Toward a History of Low Knowledge and American Politics: From the Early Republic to the Age of Empire

More than half a century ago, Richard Hofstadter called for a political history that could go beyond the rational calculation of interests to encompass “the symbolic and myth-making aspects of the human mind,” including the “intellectual and rhetorical styles” and the “symbolic gestures” that shaped American political culture. Hofstadter thought in terms of a bottom-up phenomenon, in which study of “the emotional life of the masses” could move scholarly studies beyond political structures and institutions to contemplate the broader arena of what he called “the political milieu.”^{Footnote 3} Similarly, more recent studies of rumor and modern politics have focused on rumor as emanating from society at large, whether as a vehicle for popular politics, a means for publics to respond to sudden crises or disquieting forms of social change, or a strategic resource by which subaltern populations excluded from the formal avenues of political power make sense of their lives and challenge official versions of reality.^{Footnote 4} Where the state appears, its main interest concerns the mass surveillance of rumors as a means of gauging popular thought and opinion in order to understand and manage the population as a whole.^{Footnote 5} One might go further, however, and see rumor and other kinds of vernacular knowledge not simply as the province of society, or as idiosyncratic forms of raw informational materials that the state could transform into aggregated, synoptic, seemingly social scientific understandings of the population, but as part of a wider range of state practices. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James C. Scott observed that social elites, and not just peasants, also employed hidden transcripts—that is, a range of socially and legally unsanctioned practices—in their negotiation of power relationships.^{Footnote 6} Perhaps the state can be said to employ hidden transcripts as well, and Cold War–era FBI files of suspected security risks, with their secret accounts of confidential informants’ reports, could be thought of as hidden transcripts in both a literal and figurative sense.

In his path-breaking study of British colonial India during the heyday of the East India Company, C. A. Bayly invoked the concept of the “information order” to explore the state’s reliance upon vernacular knowledge as an essential tool of governance. As Bayly demonstrated, the assertion of colonial rule required far more than official statistics gathered by skilled experts in order to make society legible and visible to the state. Until the East India Company learned how to tap into the existing communications networks that defined the information order of the Mughal empire—namely, a highly sophisticated social system in which learned scribes, runners, well-placed women, and other figures possessed the linguistic and cultural skills to navigate Mughal society—they had no prospects for extending governmental authority. Access to rumor, gossip, and other forms of everyday, nonstandardizable information assembled through the cultivation of multiple networks of informants provided the British with the critical means for penetrating what was for them an otherwise invisible and baffling social order. Colonial knowledge remained highly imperfect and superficial, which left the British vulnerable to recurrent “information panics” and “better at picking up warnings about insurrections than understanding the inner workings of Indian institutions.” Even that limited range of comprehension, however, would have been all but impossible without the East India Company’s ability to develop “the art of listening in” and act upon noncodified, idiosyncratic, personalized forms of reportage that became essential sources of knowledge.^{Footnote 7}

Rumor and gossip have also functioned as key tools of politics and state power in the United States, and a few brief snapshots from early national politics, business in the mid-nineteenth century, and American empire in the early twentieth century suggest the importance of bringing low knowledge to the center of political analysis. Joanne B. Freeman has examined the political culture of the early national period and the elaborate social codes and rituals by which elites waged political battles through contestations of personal reputation and authority. In particular, personal honor and its defense constituted a critical form of political currency for American political leaders anxious to uphold republican virtue amid all of the uncertainties of the post-Revolutionary polity. In the amalgamation of politics and honor that defined this late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world, the skillful deployment of rumor, of gossip, of carefully calibrated aspersions and insults, of oblique slights and slanders—all were necessary tools of intrigue to advance not simply one’s own individual fortunes, but the broader political agendas and programs that bitterly divided Republicans and Federalists in the early republic. Word of Republicans’ alleged over-partiality toward France or Federalists’ favoritism toward Britain, rumors of back-door political deals that violated republican aspirations toward open government, ever-present suspicions about the optics of the presidency and Federalist plots to reintroduce monarchy, scuttlebutt about politicians’ involvement in speculative investment schemes or other shenanigans that signified political corruption, carefully noted observations about competitors’ extramarital liaisons, and other forms of political gossip spread readily, in a process that was anything but careless. In the political culture of the early republic, adept politicians understood the social codes and strategies for gaining advantage by leaking excerpts from one’s own correspondence or that of rivals, circulating purported statements from soirées, receptions, or other public gatherings, gleaning political intelligence in dinner parties and other intimate settings, placing allies and subordinates in taverns to listen and gauge public opinion, and otherwise obtaining and deploying the kinds of low knowledge whose circulation powerfully shaped politics in the early national period.^{Footnote 8}

The “Citizen Genet” affair of 1793, as analyzed by Freeman, offers a prime example of how this system of political gossip functioned. In that year, French minister Edmond Genet sought American support and armed privateers for France’s latest war with Britain, a proposal deeply threatening to President George Washington’s insistence on a policy of strict neutrality, particularly in light of the rival Republicans’ enthusiasm for the French revolution and hopes that a virtuous sister republic would emerge on the European continent. Rumors that Genet sought to go over Washington’s head and appeal directly to the American people to break neutrality and side with France went viral after their validation in a public letter from Senator Rufus King and Chief Justice John Jay, neither of whom had witnessed Genet making his supposed comment. The two men carefully calibrated this act, as a means of spreading political gossip that created a scandal for Republicans and protected the Federalist policy of diplomatic neutrality. Forced on the defensive, the Republicans had to distance themselves from Genet, although they softened the blow by accusing the Federalists of acting out of partiality toward Britain.^{Footnote 9} The incident dramatically illustrates the power of gossip as a form of intelligence and the abilities required to succeed in this highly mannered yet incredibly vicious political culture. To pursue a national political career, a leader who sought to wage political warfare while simultaneously cultivating a gentlemanly demeanor needed to know how to navigate a complex world of letters, in which the public circulation of ostensibly private letters and the trading of taunts and allegations through newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides stimulated the whisper campaigns that transmitted information and shaped political allegiances around the nation.

This political world of rumor and slander occasionally produced deadly results, most famously in the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In its intensely personal nature, it seems far removed—both in time and character—from the bureaucratized, routinized, and orderly aspirations of the modern state. In informational respects, however, these seemingly disparate settings share more in common than one might acknowledge at first glance. The challenge is to contemplate how the various forms of vernacular knowledge at work in early American political culture were translated into the apparatus of the state during a new age of bureaucracy and organizational society.

We might think about the rise of credit reporting agencies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a historical way station in the development of bureaucratic mechanisms for gathering, organizing, and using opinion and other small tidbits of information derived from the singular, subjective, and idiosyncratic views of human informants. Credit reporting agencies, also known as mercantile agencies, were invented to facilitate financial relationships in an increasingly dispersed and anonymous world in which face-to-face interactions could no longer form the basis for judgments of reliability and creditworthiness. In order to do so, they assembled massive amounts of data in order to peer into personal lives and construct evaluations of character. As Josh Lauer has observed, in a thought-provoking essay about mercantile agencies, surveillance, and finance, this new bureaucratic machinery “converted the financial means and reputation of individuals into quasi-empirical facts.” This notion of the “quasi-empirical” character of credit reporting is significant, because it denotes the ability of credit reporting agencies to foster an image of their mission as one of objective analysis based on solid and indisputable facts, rather than a much shakier grounding in everyday human perceptions rooted in all the vagaries of American society and its prejudices. As Lauer puts it, the system worked by using “socially determined markers of trustworthiness and economic legitimacy,” which it then “obscured behind the veil of quantification and technical neutrality.”^{Footnote 10}

In essence, credit reporting agencies functioned as information factories, which took the raw materials of rumor, gossip, and personal judgments and opinions and transformed them—seemingly through a combination of fiat and the imprimatur of a receptive, paying clientele—into the hard facts and data that determined financial fates. In an era of corporate expansion and large business enterprise, the mercantile agencies became massive bureaucracies, with elaborate systems for filing, indexing, cross-referencing, and otherwise organizing information about tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, of individuals and businesses. For example, R. G. Dun and Company, one of the key players in the credit reporting industry, went from some twenty thousand names in its reference books in 1859 to more than half a million in 1872, and then a million in 1886. Although Dun and its primary competitor, Bradstreet’s, portrayed their inquiries as highly professional operations conducted by discerning and trained employees, as Lauer points out, such investigations rested upon “personal opinion, informal hearsay, rumor, and anecdotes judiciously culled from local news and conversation.”^{Footnote 11} Not surprisingly, critics deeply resented the power of unnamed local correspondents, the sources for mercantile agencies’ data, to evaluate personal character based on the impressionistic rumors and gossip from which reputations emerged. In 1850, for example, the New York journalist and writer George G. Foster lambasted credit reporting as a type of espionage, in which spies worked in secret to report on “the property, the associations, the business, the family, and the personal habits” of those who sought credit. Libel suits against mercantile agencies also indicated aggrieved parties’ view of credit reports as compilations of gossip and innuendo, and not reasoned determinations of social fact.^{Footnote 12}

The latter-day loyalty-security state of the mid-twentieth century bears a remarkable resemblance to the mid-nineteenth-century mercantile agency. Both evolved into enormous bureaucratic enterprises, with endless files of reportage about the personal traits and habits of different persons, as well as a mission to subject intangible qualities of character to routinized forms of judgment—or to at least create an impression that objective, bureaucratic procedures could produce accurate assessments about individuals’ nature and trustworthiness. Both also possessed the power to damage reputations and destroy prospects, while those denied credit or labeled security risks had limited recourse against the institutionally legitimized whisper campaigns of these large, seemingly faceless organizations and their anonymous informants.

The precise lines of descent between credit reporting agencies and the American surveillance state remain unknown, but Alfred W. McCoy, in his magisterial study of American colonial policing in the Philippines, has mounted a powerful case for the genealogy of the modern state from the information revolution that transformed American business in the second half of the nineteenth century. The technological revolution in communications from telegraphy to telephony, the development of Hollerith machines and other devices capable of sorting massive amounts of data, and the rise of new organizational systems for categorizing, filing, and retrieving information that were part and parcel of the emergence of large business enterprise also created dramatic new possibilities for the vast expansion of state power through policing, surveillance, and the deployment of political intelligence. Although all of the major imperial powers sought to capitalize upon novel techniques for acquiring and managing information, none proved more precocious than the United States.^{Footnote 13}

McCoy has documented the process by which technology, bureaucracy, colonial aspiration, and high-placed political ambitions melded together to produce an all-encompassing, American-sponsored police state in the Philippines during the early years of the twentieth century. The U.S. colonial regime created a gargantuan bureaucratic and police apparatus for monitoring sources of potential alliance or dissent, amassing files on suspect individuals, and using information and disinformation. That surveillance network functioned not just to maintain control by disciplining, punishing, and destroying nationalist movements, but also to serve the careerist political designs of General Leonard Wood, an ambitious player within the American military hierarchy in the Philippines whose U.S. presidential aspirations fell short, but who would become governor general of the Philippines in the 1920s; governor general William Howard Taft, who was also, of course, a future U.S. president and future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; and other leading colonial officials. The new American empire deployed violence aplenty in its mission to quell nationalist insurgencies, but its key innovations as an exemplar of the modern state came in the form of information management and control. In particular, the skillful deployment of low knowledge—for example, rumblings about financial indiscretions or salacious rumors of sexual deviance inserted in the appropriate newspapers or passed along to the right individuals at critical moments—provided ample means for discrediting both Filipino dissidents and American political rivals. Historians have generally not wanted to take scandal seriously as the stuff of real politics, but in McCoy’s rendering, “scandal was not just gossip,” but a source of immense power in a colonial political culture where the omnipresence of rumor meant “the constant threat of political death by scandal.” Far from mere epiphenomenon, rumor, gossip, innuendo, and the politics of scandal, McCoy concludes, played a “critical role . . . in the high colonial politics” of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.^{Footnote 14}

Rumors, Whispers, and Cold War Science: Scientists, the Loyalty-Security System, and the Myth of the Vital Secret

This regime of colonial policing, surveillance, and information warfare shaped not just the political culture of the postcolonial Philippines, but also the disruptive workings of internal security in the United States. McCoy has provided a powerful outline of the latter’s institutional history from the post–World War I period to the era of the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s and their revelations about the extensive apparatus of the American surveillance state. From the policing practices of American empire came the mixture of public and private bodies—for example, the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation), state-level organs of surveillance, volunteers from the American Protective League, the American Legion, and other citizens’ organizations, and the one-man intelligence machine of Ralph Van Deman, a former Army general in the Philippines who privately gathered massive amounts of information on persons he considered subversives—that formed a diffuse yet interlocking network. This internal security directorate, defined by formal and informal ties that managed simultaneously to be dispersed yet tightly organized, policed political opinion and contained perceived threats to domestic security throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century.^{Footnote 15}

My own interests here focus on but a small part of this large-scale surveillance network, namely, the tidbits of rumor and gossip—small packets of idiosyncratic, personal observation transformed by the bureaucratic process into relevant facts—that counted as information in security clearance cases of scientists in the 1940s and 1950s, and the cultural imagery at work in the basic idea of what constituted a vital atomic secret. Histories of public policy have paid little attention to the loyalty and security clearance system, which might seem bureaucratically bland and narrow compared to the more privileged arenas of social welfare policy and political economy that tend to attract readers of this journal. Or perhaps policy historians prefer to concentrate on the progressive possibilities of the modern state, and not its darker, more regressive dimensions.^{Footnote 16} To contemplate the loyalty-security system of the early post–World War II period, even in its most ordinary and mundane operations, is to enter a different kind of social world, one fraught with the anxieties and suspicions that came with living in a state of surveillance. My account here of scientists’ Cold War skirmishes with the security system will be far removed from the realm of wiretapping, mail intercepts, break-ins, political dirty tricks, and other more spectacular interventions of the surveillance state. Yet, for those who came under unwanted scrutiny, the experiences were no less unsettling.

In 1947 and 1948, as the outlines of political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union became increasingly stark and the two countries descended into a state of Cold War, security clearance became an increasingly contentious issue for American scientists in the evolving nuclear establishment. The transition from the wartime Manhattan Project to the postwar Atomic Energy Commission also took place amid growing tensions within the United States, as resurgent anticommunism became a key ideological weapon for waging partisan political struggles. In this context, politically aware scientists in physics and related fields, particularly former Manhattan Project personnel who entered the political arena as part of the postwar atomic scientists’ movement in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, became troubled by reports of scientists denied security clearances for what seemed to be ordinary political commitments and activities. In mid-1948, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported on a series of security clearance cases that were throwing the laboratories and nuclear facilities of Oak Ridge into anxious disarray.

The Association of Oak Ridge Scientists and Engineers (a chapter of the scientists’ movement’s main organizational arm, the Federation of American Scientists) issued a security bulletin that reproduced verbatim, except for redactions to protect the identities of the accused, the charges listed against five of the embattled Oak Ridge scientists. The allegations against three of those scientists read in full as follows:

I have quoted these charges in their entirety in order to convey fully the forms of rumor, gossip, and anonymous reportage that constituted legitimate forms of information in the post–World War II loyalty-security system. At the time, the AEC was still in the process of formulating its procedures for adjudicating security clearance cases, as was the rest of the federal government, which had to establish permanent systems from the ad hoc measures implemented during World War II. In addition, President Truman’s loyalty program, established in early 1947, required loyalty investigations of all federal employees regardless of whether they needed access to secure information and thereby created another mad scramble to organize and codify federal inquiries into matters of personal belief and character. Even after the system became regularized, however, with defined categories of “derogatory information,” review boards, formal hearings in which applicants for loyalty or security clearances could contest negative decisions, and other rules and procedures, the vernacular nature of the charges never changed.^{Footnote 18} The list provided above was absolutely typical of the system that still perplexed and aggravated Charles B. Hunt, the geologist quoted at the outset of this essay, in the mid-1950s.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover often emphasized that the reports his bureau provided to other agencies consisted of raw investigatory material, factual information that it passed along without added evaluation or verification. That stance allowed Hoover to portray the FBI as a neutral, professional collector and repository of information. But of course, even aside from Hoover’s well-known propensity to share material under the table with like-minded anticommunist outfits, such as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), or otherwise engage in political warfare, the FBI made decisions all the time about the relevance of rumor and gossip and what allegations needed to be passed along in the FBI’s reports for other agencies’ security clearance inquiries.^{Footnote 19} Routine investigations consisted mainly of FBI agents’ review of an applicant’s Personnel Security Questionnaire and interviews with a long list of his or her relatives, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. The identification of “derogatory information,” the official, widely used bureaucratic term for beliefs, associations, and activities that the loyalty-security system identified with the possibility of subversive intent, inevitably required discretionary judgments from FBI agents about what to cull from the undigested mass of opinions, perceptions, and chance observations that counted as fact in the investigatory process. From there, the AEC or other agency where an individual sought a security clearance had its own mechanisms for reviewing the FBI’s report and rendering decisions.^{Footnote 20}

The confidentiality guaranteed to informants further exacerbated the gossipy, whispery quality of information as it made its way from original interview to formalized allegation. Hence the proliferation of anonymous passive voice constructions, subjunctive qualifiers, and assertions of belief, appearance, and memory that became facts of bureaucratic concern. “Certain magazines and pamphlets . . . may have been left [or not] on the premises by you [or someone else?]” and “may have included a copy of the magazine New Masses [or not].” A neighbor “believes [not ‘knows’]” that a relative “is a Communist.” Other relatives are “reported [by whom?]” to have ties with various organizations, either on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations or otherwise “reported [by whom?] to have Communistic connections [in what sense? true or false? in whose eyes?].” An unidentified someone said that you “seemed to be pro-Russian in your point of view [whatever it meant to be ‘pro-Russian’].” At one point, “you caused to have been posted [how and why? under what circumstances? according to whom?] on a bulletin board . . . an appeal for funds” on behalf of an organization that the government considered suspect.^{Footnote 21} At one level, as summaries of interviews or other materials, such expressions simply reflected the uncertainties of individual, unsworn testimony. In a social and bureaucratic context of decisions that had the power to deny career opportunities and stigmatize, however, they became linguistic markers of insinuation and innuendo, suggestive utterances that implied the commission of grave errors of judgment and crimes of disloyalty in thought and action, while also asserting the unspoken, simultaneous self-denial that they necessarily said anything at all. Thus artifice masked itself within the guise of seemingly mundane and even clumsy bureaucratic language, and the FBI report navigated the Cold War political terrain as deftly as the warring factions of the early republic had deployed gossip and whisper campaigns to create relevant facts within the established rituals of eighteenth-century political culture. To that extent, the FBI’s lingo worked to legitimate the facticity of informants’ observations. Moreover, the anonymity of reportage within the mid-twentieth-century national security state also reinforced the sense of how scientists, or anyone who fell within the purview of the loyalty-security apparatus, lived within an unnerving world of surveillance, in which all social contacts, no matter how routine, might attract the attention and disciplinary power of the state.^{Footnote 22}

Most scientists concerned about the capacity of loyalty-security investigations in the late 1940s to damage careers and reputations no doubt shared Oak Ridge nuclear chemist T. H. Davies’s view of such charges as “trifling, irrelevant, and chiefly based on unsubstantiated rumor.”^{Footnote 23} Nor did they necessarily sit well with the officials responsible for the system. One imagines that J. Edgar Hoover never lost sleep over the potential dangers of overzealousness in the name of anticommunism (or opportunities to strengthen his own political power base). But David E. Lilienthal, an ardent New Dealer, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and first chairman of the AEC, agonized about the workings of the security clearance system and its all too frequent dependence on the “flimsy, thin stuff” of FBI reports to render decisions about people’s lives even as he had to fight off pressure from HUAC and the AEC’s own congressional oversight committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, to ignore civil libertarian considerations.^{Footnote 24} Indeed, with the aid of politically engaged scientists, the AEC worked to formalize the security clearance system as a quasi-judicial forum that granted certain elements of due process to persons under fire while also preserving the forms of secrecy and anonymity insisted upon by the surveillance state.^{Footnote 25} This emphasis on fair procedures and limited due process, however, left untouched underlying questions about the nature of the evidence at hand and, at an even more basic level, what the state was looking for when it attempted to identify persons who might be what it deemed “security risks.” Instead, undue emphasis on procedures quietly legitimated the system’s substantive reliance on low knowledge to evaluate human threats to security.

Ultimately, no amount of proceduralism and bureaucratic rationalization could surmount the fundamentally ineffable quality of what the state sought to know about the human person when it granted or denied a security clearance. The enabling legislation of the Atomic Energy Commission wrote investigations by the FBI of employees’ “character, associations, and loyalty” into statute. “Character” and “loyalty” are not exactly qualities amenable to social scientific analysis or legal evaluation, however, especially as a predictive exercise of future misconduct. As one member of the AEC board in charge of reviewing the aforementioned Oak Ridge cases put it, “We are trying to judge these men by their words and their bearing. It’s really a job for a psychoanalyst, not a lawyer.”^{Footnote 26} In his 1950 study, Security, Loyalty, and Science, Columbia University law professor Walter Gellhorn rightly observed that the loyalty-security system, in its shaky and probabilistic search to identify persons who “may be disposed to be wicked or careless at some indeterminately future time” (italics in original), engaged not in an objective determination of fact, but a subjective judgment about personality. As he put it, “What is really being appraised in a personnel security case is not any particular question of fact but is, in a word, a man.”^{Footnote 27}

Invented bureaucratic categories, such as “derogatory information” or “sympathetic association” (the latter a cover-all for the beliefs, political memberships, and personal connections thought to connote dangerous commitments to subversive ideologies), attempted to put a gloss of objective analysis on a bureaucratic process rife with subjective judgment. Critics of Cold War anticommunism frequently underscored the political biases at work in such categories, in which interest in arms control, international scientific exchanges, improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, an alternative to Cold War confrontation, civil rights for African Americans, an expanded labor movement, or political and economic possibilities beyond the margins of liberal consensus potentially constituted evidence of subversive potential, rather than normal exercises of political freedom. What to the Federation of American Scientists constituted a standard and unproblematic political appeal to the American Legion to support international control of atomic energy, for example, was for J. Edgar Hoover “a shocking commentation on Communist penetration.”^{Footnote 28} But the problem rested on more than simply divergent political worldviews. Vernacular categories of analysis dominated the factual currency of the system precisely because reputation, at root, remained a social phenomenon determined by the vagaries of human interactions, especially the consequences of how people perceived each other and what they said about each other. No amount of legal and bureaucratic machinery could erase the fundamentally social and indefinable character of such human judgments.

In essence, the idea of loyalty, as conceived under the loyalty-security system, assumed the existence of a certain kind of private and authentic self accessible through indirect means, in which one’s reading material, organizational affiliations, political acquaintances, tendency toward dissent, rejection of authority, and expressed political beliefs provided clues about reliability and allegiance.^{Footnote 29} But what did a putative “security risk” actually look like? That image relied heavily upon the stereotypes that pervaded Cold War America. The idea of the communist as aberrant personality, immature at best and psychologically damaged at worst, and therefore both highly unreliable and likely to be disloyal was one element of that cultural repertoire. Widely dispersed assumptions about homosexuals as gossipy by nature and therefore unable to keep secrets, as well as vulnerable to blackmail, also shaped federal clearance decisions and the broader politics of Cold War anticommunism. Amid such images, American liberals also fought against looser notions about their brethren as politically naive and prone to subversive activity, some by defending wholeheartedly the value of progressive ideals, and others by tying their political commitments to a self-declared realism and liberal anticommunism.^{Footnote 30}

In this setting, stereotypical impressions of clean-cut, patriotic American-ness provided a cultural resource with which to navigate the loyalty-security system and its evaluation of personhood. In the fall of 1948, for example, a young physicist named Robert H. Vought finally won a hearing before a local AEC security board, after more than two years of bureaucratic confusion and frustration following his being denied a security clearance to work at the Research Laboratory of General Electric. Most of the charges against him concerned his involvement while in graduate school in a Philadelphia-based civil rights organization called the United People’s Action Committee.^{Footnote 31} The hearing, however, ended up focusing less on the charges, their veracity, and their meaning, than it did on exploring Vought’s identity. Vought himself told a version of his life history to the committee, in order to establish that he led “a normal life, normal American life, with no indications of instability or insecurity.” His defense consisted mainly of affidavits and testimony about his character, reliability, good judgment, and unquestionable loyalty from mentors, colleagues, and friends. Most tellingly, this performance of typical American-ness even included the presentation of affidavits from local leaders of the Boy Scouts whom he had known as a youngster in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As Vought commented many years later, he resorted to such measures “because, what else [did] I have to offer, other than denying what they have accused me of. . . . What else did I have? Except I’m a good guy?” The strategy apparently worked: although Vought had already taken a faculty position at Union College, the AEC reversed its original decision, and questions about his security status did not impede his research under military contracts or his return to industrial physics several years later.^{Footnote 32}

Cultural stereotypes framed not just assumptions about who constituted a trustworthy individual, but also basic ideas about the information that the state sought to protect. In the area of nuclear security, the vernacular concept of the “vital secret” continually intruded upon political discussions. The former Manhattan Project scientists who campaigned on behalf of arms control, or what in the early postwar period was called “international control of atomic energy,” constantly decried what they called the myth of the “vital secret” and rejected reliance upon secrecy as a means to maintain the American nuclear monopoly. Although technical details about the bomb’s manufacture remained under wraps, “none of these,” they argued, “can be called the secret of the bomb.” Rather, in an era in which other nations possessed advanced scientific expertise and the capacity to develop nuclear weapons on their own, only international political agreements, not secrecy, could forestall a dangerous arms race and guarantee long-term security.^{Footnote 33}

Alex Wellerstein has documented a particularly telling historical episode that underscores the limitations of atomic secrecy. In the fall of 1945, a group of young physicists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by assistant professor William E. Stephens, took it upon themselves to test the atomic scientists’ proposition about the primacy of international control over secrecy as a guarantor of American security. All of them had worked on radar during the war, and not the Manhattan Project, and they convened a series of seminars to derive what they could about the atomic bomb based on openly available information. Their findings included calculations of critical mass and, to the particular chagrin of Manhattan Project censors, a description of an implosion-type mechanism for producing a high-yield nuclear explosion. That feature of bomb design sounded all too much like the still-classified concept of implosion behind the plutonium-based “Fat Man” bomb that had destroyed Nagasaki. The Manhattan Engineering District, and subsequently the AEC after it commenced operations in January 1947, both pressured the physicists to remove the section on implosion and other details from their planned publication of the seminars, and when the volume finally came out late in 1948, it contained little that was worthy of notice.^{Footnote 34} For those in the know, however, this incident and other cases in which scientists outside the Manhattan Project derived from published information facts and possibilities that the nuclear establishment would have preferred to remain hidden illustrated the ultimate futility of secrecy and the need for political solutions to the potential threat of nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear secrecy and the criteria for what forms of scientific information to classify and what to allow into the public sphere remains a highly complex area of decisionmaking to this day, one defined not simply by technical issues, but an array of administrative factors and political motivations. Within the AEC, there was no one “vital secret,” but rather an endless range of determinations, based on technical judgments about what could and could not be released, wishful hopes to contain ideas and not just specific facts (as in the aforementioned case of implosion), and administrative or political considerations aimed at obscuring the commission’s programmatic priorities or protecting its public image.^{Footnote 35} Not surprisingly, the nuances and finer distinctions of such discussions did not translate easily into public debate, not least because scientific experts themselves could not come to a uniform consensus about secrecy and classification, not even at the level of technical information. As Wellerstein has pointed out, “Even if there is an idealized security policy that comes with the technology of the bomb, nobody can agree on what it is, or should be.” The problem arises, Wellerstein notes, from the diffuse and profoundly social nature of the task that nuclear secrecy engendered: “It is not simply about the removal of certain terms from documents or the locking of papers in a safe: it is about creating fundamentally re-engineered social networks around the problem of knowledge creation and transmission, to prevent the power of knowledge from falling into unsafe or unreliable hands.” What forms of knowledge to cordon off, and how to design and manage the social networks involved, remained a constant, ongoing challenge in a bureaucratic leviathan that by 1954 had already created some 60 million classified documents within the AEC alone.^{Footnote 36} The actual challenges of secrecy simply defied bureaucratic expectations of rationalization and codification.

Against these complex and themselves frequently hidden realities, vernacular ways of knowing continued to imagine nuclear secrecy as a simple mission of protecting discrete, easily identified forms of information. During the early postwar years, congressional conservatives, for example, constantly charged advocates of civilian and international control of atomic energy with wanting to give away “the secret of the atom.” As Congressman Frederick C. Smith (R-Ohio) put it in 1946, in making a typical case for atomic energy to remain under military control and development, rather than the proposed civilian Atomic Energy Commission, “I have never been able to understand why anybody should want to give this secret away. It is safe where it is. Why turn it over to this Commission that will be set up under this bill and run the risk of losing it?”^{Footnote 37} Popular culture also upheld notions of the vital secret as a singular, critical blueprint, mathematical formula, or set of documents hidden away in a vault. In the 1952 B-movie thriller “The Atomic City,” for example, evil agents (presumably communists working for the Soviet Union, although the C-word is never actually used, and the Soviets go unmentioned as well) kidnap the young son of lead Los Alamos scientist Frank Addison in order to pressure him into supplying crucial classified data. The film’s opening shots set the stage by providing a visual survey of nuclear facilities at Los Alamos, with the faces of workers blacked out “for security reasons,” as well as a stern warning from the narrator that “absolute security is vital if the free world is to survive.” This stated categorical imperative already departed completely from the internal culture of the AEC, which recognized secrecy not as an absolute, but as a necessary balancing act between allowing information to flow easily enough to avoid inhibiting scientific progress, while keeping it from unwanted exposure. Then, as the film develops, it utilizes the classic tropes of “the atomic secret.” Frank has “only forty-eight hours to deliver the bomb” if he wants to save his son’s life. More specifically, the bad guys demand that he hand over “everything we know about the H bomb.” Apparently, a single envelope containing complicated mathematical formulae (from a failed experiment, because Frank is trying to buy time without placing “half the world” at risk) is sufficient to placate the kidnappers as a plausible fulfillment of their demands, while their own scientist checks the work. Meanwhile, FBI agents have caught wind of the nefarious plot, and (spoiler alert!) their consummate professional intervention, combined with a little luck, saves both boy and nation.^{Footnote 38}

None of this is to question the reality of Soviet espionage in the post–World War II period, the extent to which the American Communist Party functioned as a recruiting ground for Soviet spies, or the legitimate and serious reasons for nuclear and other state secrets.^{Footnote 39} It is, however, to interrogate the extent to which the ways of knowing that inform state practices and permeate political life readily include, and even depend upon, unruly forms of vernacular knowledge, and not just the organized, specialized products of expertise. Images of the “vital secret” might have remained fantasy and harmless fun had they remained confined to the cinema. As ways of imagining the world and how it worked, however, they fed political confrontations over secrecy and security between Congress and administrative agencies, even as the personnel security system institutionalized rumor and gossip as relevant sources of information.

The Cold War Revisited: The Cox Report, the Wen Ho Lee Case, and the Persistence of the Atomic Vernacular, 1999 to Present

The historical dynamic of secrecy, security, and the political power of low knowledge belongs not to a distant past, but to ongoing processes of policy and conflict. In recent years, the persistence of the vital secret mentality has combined with deeply rooted ethnic stereotypes to shape post–Cold War responses to China’s rise as a world power. In May 1999, the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, chaired by Congressman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), made headlines across the United States when it issued startling and sensational allegations of extensive nuclear and high-technology espionage by China. The committee’s nearly 900-page-long unclassified version of its report offered a masterpiece of hyperbole in its overwrought depiction of China as a totalitarian, expansion-minded, militaristic, and aggressive foreign adversary, which sparked strong objections from expert critics.^{Footnote 40} Given the Cox committee’s origins in a partisan effort to search for potential evidence to impeach President Bill Clinton and its seemingly determined misrepresentations, it does not take much insight to understand the report as intellectually disingenuous and highly political.^{Footnote 41} To settle for a point-by-point factual rebuttal, however, would miss the Cox report’s vernacular qualities, which powered the committee’s appeal by mobilizing familiar forms of low knowledge, including well-worn images of vital secrets and disloyal ethnic others, with the latter a particularly adaptable concept for Asian Americans already beset by cultural stereotypes about their perpetual foreignness.^{Footnote 42} Moreover, in the nearly two decades since the Cox report, an ever-burgeoning regime of convoluted and frequently incomprehensible regulations has exacerbated the perception of threat and, in some cases, subjected Chinese American scientists to extraordinary prosecutions for routine scientific activities.

The Cox report’s portrayal of nuclear espionage seemed to come directly from the anticommunist playbook of the 1940s and 1950s, precisely because the forms of vernacular knowledge that it relied upon rested on a long-established cultural repository of tropes about communist-inspired subversion and espionage, the image of the vital secret, and ethnic stereotyping. First of all, just as congressional conservatives in the early Cold War years lumped together espionage and legal forms of acquiring scientific information, the Cox committee similarly failed to distinguish between the legitimate need of the United States to protect classified state secrets and the right of other states to mine open sources of information. Hence, the committee cited the PRC’s “widespread effort to obtain U.S. military technologies by any means–legal or illegal” and categorized both means of acquiring information as equally dangerous for the United States. As the report observed, “These pervasive efforts pose a particularly significant threat to U.S. export control and counterintelligence efforts.”^{Footnote 43}

Repeatedly, the select committee implied that there was something insidious about normal means of building social networks and gathering openly available data, as if this process was tantamount to illegal espionage. Thus, the report referred gravely to China’s use of “commercial and political contacts to advance its efforts to obtain U.S. military, as well as commercial, technology” and observed that “the PRC collects military-related science and technology information from openly available U.S. and Western sources and military researchers.” The Cox committee then noted in the same breath that the PRC’s efforts to gather intelligence on nuclear weapons technology encompassed “espionage, rigorous review of U.S. unclassified technical and academic publications, and extensive interaction with U.S. scientists and Department of Energy laboratories.”^{Footnote 44} Such statements paralleled the atomic vernacular of the Cold War, such as HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas’s description in 1947 of Russia’s acquisition of openly available information about American patents as “legal espionage,” which he claimed could help the Soviet Union obtain “the great secret of the atomic bomb.”^{Footnote 45} The Cox committee did try on occasion to be more restrained in its damage assessments than the anticommunists of the post–World War II decade. Now and then, the report offered a rare qualification, such as noting that while China very actively sought information about a wide range of technologies, “not all of it, by any means, presents national security or law enforcement concerns.”^{Footnote 46} The overall tenor of the report, however, conveyed the impression that all of the means that the PRC employed to build its technological expertise involved underhanded, illicit activities that constituted espionage by another name.

The Cox committee also perpetuated the old notion of the vital secret in its depictions of the damage supposedly wrought by Chinese nuclear espionage, in an analysis built upon a popular shorthand of what the loss of technological secrets meant, rather than more complicated realities of technology transfer and strategic significance. For example, the report asserted that “stolen U.S. nuclear secrets give the PRC design information on thermonuclear weapons on a par with our own,” adding ominously, “With the stolen U.S. technology, the PRC has leaped, in a handful of years, from 1950s-era strategic nuclear capabilities to the more modern thermonuclear weapons designs.”^{Footnote 47} That image of a great nuclear leap forward, achieved easily and automatically through the acquisition of stolen knowledge, echoed Cold War anticommunists’ depictions of atomic espionage as a catastrophic blow to American national security. In reality, technology transfer via espionage is no simple matter, and states cannot exploit ill-gotten gains without preexisting scientific and technological capacities. For example, as David Holloway’s careful study of the Soviet atomic bomb project demonstrated long ago, the use of stolen data accelerated the Soviet effort by no more than a year or two, and even though “Joe-1” was a copy of the American implosion device used at Nagasaki, the effort to replicate the American bomb rather than design a Soviet weapon independently resulted from political decisions, and not a lack of Soviet scientific or technological ability.^{Footnote 48} Although espionage is a grave matter and states have a right to take it seriously, technological advantage is also no more than temporary in a world in which numerous nations possess advanced scientific capabilities.^{Footnote 49} In the case of China, an interagency intelligence community panel reached much more temperate findings than the Cox committee and concluded, “We believe it is more likely that the Chinese used US design information to inform their own [nuclear weapons] program than to replicate US weapon designs.”^{Footnote 50} Technological espionage may be significant, but it is not determinative—a state’s preexisting scientific and technological infrastructure strongly conditions its use of ill-gotten information.

More important, technological capability by itself means nothing without an understanding of how it fits into a state’s strategic objectives. The Cox report tended to equate capability with an intention to deploy and implied that China would pose a new nuclear threat to the United States within the near future. At no point did the committee attempt an in-depth analysis of Chinese nuclear strategy or offer reasons for predicting a major Chinese nuclear build-up beyond a Cold War style depiction of Chinese militarism, because its rendition of policy analysis relied on the vernacular truth of a powerful, alien, and threatening international rival. American experts on nuclear strategy responded that since China became a nuclear state in 1964, it had followed a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and it maintained an arsenal of minimum size strictly for purposes of deterrence. As of 1999, China had about twenty nuclear missiles capable of striking the United States, as compared to several thousand long-range missiles in the American nuclear arsenal, and it had not even equipped its arsenal with MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), despite possessing the technical means to do so for a considerable period of time.^{Footnote 51} That strategic posture has not changed significantly in the years since. According to the “Nuclear notebook” maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as of 2013 China had built up to a nuclear arsenal of about sixty long-range missiles that could reach U.S. territory, of which only forty were capable of hitting the continental United States, a growth rate slower than what the U.S. intelligence community had estimated as Chinese aims back in 2005. The Chinese state still had yet to deploy MIRVs, and it had not deviated from its original nuclear strategy of maintaining a small deterrent force.^{Footnote 52}

The Cox committee’s assessment of internal security threats also contained echoes of the past. Alfred McCoy’s analysis of the surveillance state in the Philippines and its descendants in the United States up to the mid-twentieth century emphasized the ubiquity of ethnic stereotyping as part of the identification of purported threats.^{Footnote 53} Such stereotyping lingered during the Cold War in heightened suspicion of Jews as particularly susceptible to leftist leanings, although Cold War anticommunism also cast the net widely in its identification of ideological commitments as the key marker of disloyalty.^{Footnote 54} In the post–Cold War calculus of distrust, ethnicity has returned to supplant ideology as the predominant shorthand for identifying human threats to national security.^{Footnote 55} In the case of the Cox report’s account of nuclear espionage, the committee alleged that China’s intelligence methods were highly unusual in their widespread use of ordinary persons, not just professional spies, as sources of information.^{Footnote 56} Under this system, all Chinese in the United States constituted potential agents. As the committee observed, “The PRC employs all types of people, organizations, and collection operations to acquire sensitive technology: threats to national security can come from PRC scientists, students, business people, or bureaucrats.” In particular, Chinese scientists provided China with an especially rich source of data about American technology. “Many PRC scientists,” the report emphasized, “were educated in the United States and retain valuable contacts in the U.S. research and business community who can be exploited for technology transfer.”^{Footnote 57} The hundred thousand Chinese nationals who were students in the United States offered “another opportunity for the PRC to collect sensitive technology.” All such students, according to the report, “provide a ready target for PRC intelligence officers and PRC Government-controlled organizations, both while they are in the United States and when they return to the PRC.”^{Footnote 58} In addition, the Cox report stressed, the Chinese intelligence establishment also focused on Chinese Americans for assistance in making “illegal technology or information transfers.”^{Footnote 59}

In one of the report’s worst factual abuses, the Cox committee pointed to the case of Qian Xuesen (Tsien Hsueshen) as evidence that China had a long record of exploiting Chinese within the United States for purposes of espionage. The committee’s invocation of the case provides yet another link between Cold War anticommunism and post–Cold War anxieties about China. Qian left China in the mid-1930s to study aeronautics in the United States. As the brilliant protégé of Theodore von Kármán, he became, in less than a decade, one of the world’s most prominent authorities on jet propulsion. During and immediately after World War II, Qian ascended to the highest reaches of the science-military establishment. He joined the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Group in 1945, served as a personal staffer for von Kármán, who was consulting for the Air Force in Washington that year, and worked on classified projects for the Navy, Air Force, and Manhattan District in the early postwar years. Guilt by association, however, ultimately ended Qian’s distinguished career in the United States. In June 1950, the FBI began to suspect Qian of communist sympathies because of his friendship with a fellow scientist who had been actively involved in the American Communist Party in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The U.S. military had considered allegations of communist associations on Qian’s part before and never deemed them an impediment, but in the changed political atmosphere of 1950s America, with the anticommunist consensus firmly in place, Qian lost his security clearance. With the rise of the Korean War, the thirty-six-hundred Chinese nationals studying science and engineering at American universities also found themselves increasingly under suspicion and faced with an American government torn between forcing them to stay in the United States to deny the PRC technical expertise and wanting to deport them out of fears that they posed a security risk. For Qian, a five-year ordeal began that included two weeks of detention by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), restriction to Los Angeles, constant FBI surveillance, and a long legal battle. Finally, in 1955, the United States deported Qian as part of an agreement that exchanged Chinese nationals for American prisoners from the Korean War. Qian had wanted to stay in the United States and become an American citizen, but after his forced return to China, he used his expertise to build the PRC’s ballistic missile program. Thus did anticommunism lead the United States to deny itself Qian’s technical prowess and inadvertently aid China’s development of ballistic missile technology.^{Footnote 60}

Iris Chang, Qian’s biographer, conducted extensive research into Qian’s struggle with the security system and the INS and concluded that he was a casualty of Cold War injustice. The Cox committee, however, reached opposite conclusions and stated without evidence, “The allegations that he [Qian] was spying for the PRC are presumed to be true.”^{Footnote 61} The committee also erroneously claimed that Qian had worked on the Titan missile program and implied that his knowledge of the Titan project had helped China build intercontinental ballistic missiles. In actuality, Qian lost his security clearance five years before the Titan program began and therefore could not have taken part in it. The Cox committee pointed to Qian to illustrate China’s long-standing use of espionage to gain important military technologies, in an exercise of innuendo that exploited the specter of China’s rise as a global power to portray false claims as fact and thereby to perpetuate further the translation of Cold War images of threat into a post–Cold War idiom.

The grandiose allegations of the Cox committee had the power to shape policy, not simply because of the political legitimacy that came with their congressional origins, but because of their ability to tap into the vernacular shorthands that support people’s ideas about the world around them. Rumor and its informational relatives are far more than merely unreliable facts in circulation. They offer models of how the world works, and their ability to circulate rests on the support of the social networks that deem them plausible as conceptions of reality. Information travels through its ability to earn access to the social and institutional machinery of circulation through a variety of means, only some of which are predicated on judgments of veracity or reliability.^{Footnote 62} The Cox report derived its political validity from more than a half century of ingrained thinking based on the guiding assumption of the international order as a place of threat, as well as an immense state apparatus—the national security state—that made the quest for security an essential part of American life.

One therefore needs to read the Cox report not as the isolated product of congressional alarmists, but as part of a broader policy response that reflects American anxieties about a changing geopolitical order. In the short term, the report’s exercise in the deployment of low knowledge produced frenzied and chaotic efforts by the Department of Energy (DOE) to close perceived security breaches. In the longer term, it helped to institutionalize fears of Chinese espionage that have produced an increasingly onerous regime of secrecy and knowledge regulation, one so difficult to adhere to that inevitable violations have further magnified the sense of threat.

For Asian Americans long-familiar with the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype that has left them always vulnerable to challenges to the American-ness of their identities and allegiances, the immediate fallout from the Cox report had a chilling effect. Asian American scientists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Sandia National Laboratories, and elsewhere reported feeling themselves under suspicion and worried about employment discrimination.^{Footnote 63} The espionage investigation and subsequent arrest of Wen Ho Lee on charges of violating security regulations fueled additional fears within the Asian American community. The investigation of Lee, a Taiwan-born, Chinese American nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, originated from an odd incident in 1995, when a Chinese intelligence agent voluntarily supplied the CIA with a classified PRC report containing data about seven types of American nuclear warheads, including classified information about the W-88 warhead.^{Footnote 64} The FBI began to investigate the national laboratories to find the source of the W-88 leak, and it eventually focused on Lee because he had worked on the warhead, and he had attended scientific conferences in Beijing. The inquiry revealed that Lee had improperly downloaded a considerable amount of restricted data onto nonsecure computers, and as a result Los Alamos fired Lee on March 8, 1999. Media coverage implied that Lee would soon be charged with espionage, but months went by without an indictment, and critics charged the FBI and Justice Department with having targeted Lee prematurely because of his ethnicity. As Robert S. Vrooman, chief of counterintelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the investigation of Lee, remonstrated, Lee became “the prime suspect based on an, at best, cursory investigation at only two facilities,” and “ethnicity was a major factor” in the decision to focus the investigation on him.^{Footnote 65}

By September, the FBI had failed to find evidence linking Lee to the W-88 disclosure, and it decided to start its investigation again from scratch and search more widely for other possible suspects. Two months later, the bureau publicly announced the discovery of technical errors in the Chinese “walk-in” document that had sparked the investigation of Lee in the first place. The errors effectively cleared Lee of passing information about the W-88 warhead to the PRC. Indeed, it appeared that the W-88 data obtained by China had not even come from Los Alamos. Sandia National Laboratories, the Lockheed-Martin Corporation, and the Navy turned out to be more likely sources.^{Footnote 66} Nonetheless, the government decided to go ahead with prosecuting Lee. After a year of intense surveillance during the original investigation, Lee then spent nine months in solitary confinement following his indictment in December 1999 on fifty-nine counts related to violations of security regulations that carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. As Lee awaited trial in prison without bail, the government’s case against him fell apart, and in September 2000 he accepted a guilty plea on the single, anticlimactic charge of having mishandled classified information. James Parker, the federal district court judge who heard the case, underscored the shoddiness of the government’s efforts when he apologized to Lee for his unfair treatment at the hands of the executive branch and openly questioned the motives behind the prosecution.^{Footnote 67}

Many Asian Americans perceived the FBI and Justice Department’s quickness to focus on Lee as a case of ethnic bias, and they viewed the government’s decision to charge him as a dangerous example of selective prosecution. After Lee’s indictment, for example, fourteen Asian Pacific American organizations issued a joint statement that criticized the original espionage investigation at Los Alamos as “flawed by negative ethnic stereotypes and fueled by anti-Chinese hysteria.” Referring to anecdotal reports from weapons scientists that downloading classified data to nonsecure computers was fairly common practice, the statement also argued that Lee had been “unfairly singled out” for prosecution “when it appears non-Chinese government employees who have mishandled classified information have not been similarly charged.” The organizations blamed the media as well for portraying the case “as a ‘Chinese spy’ case” when Lee had not been charged with espionage. Such labels, they argued, “distort the facts, perpetuate anti-Asian stereotypes and threaten the civil rights of all Asian Pacific Americans.”^{Footnote 68}

In addition to ethnic stereotyping, its legal consequences for Wen Ho Lee, and the broader climate of suspicion of ethnic Chinese scientists that it fostered, the aftermath of the Cox report also revived the vernacular concept of the vital secret in ways that created a more widespread sense of embattlement among scientists within the U.S. nuclear establishment. Two-thirds of the Cox report concerned lax security by the aerospace industry at Chinese launch facilities, and most of the rest dealt with possible export law violations involving high-speed computers and advanced machine tools. At only thirty-six pages in length, the chapter on nuclear espionage constituted the shortest, weakest, least researched, and in certain respects, least important part of the report. Yet it garnered by far the most public attention, even though the charges that industrial carelessness had allowed the PRC to improve the reliability of its nuclear delivery systems were arguably just as significant, both technologically and militarily, as the allegations regarding theft of nuclear warhead data.^{Footnote 69} But nuclear espionage possessed a cultural resonance that other forms of espionage lacked, and consequently the national laboratories bore most of the political fallout from the Cox committee’s accusations.

As congressional pressure mounted following the completion of the classified version of the Cox report, the Department of Energy initiated a security crackdown at the national laboratories. Scientists at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia generally acknowledged lapses in DOE’s enforcement of security regulations, but, as in the Cold War, they also feared an overly strict security regimen would tarnish reputations, impede scientific research, and damage cooperative arms control programs. Asian American scientists were not alone in feeling themselves the objects of suspicion. Foreign scientists from sensitive countries, especially China, India, and Russia, felt increasingly unwelcome at the national laboratories as DOE responded to congressional demands by restricting their access to computers and physical facilities.^{Footnote 70} Indeed, practically all scientists at the national laboratories felt under fire. DOE’s plans to accede to congressional recommendations and vastly expand polygraph testing particularly worried laboratory personnel, who feared ruined careers left in the wake of inaccurate test results.^{Footnote 71} New regulations also proposed to classify a wide range of topics, many of them in unclassified research fields, as “sensitive subjects.” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Burton Richter condemned the list of forbidden topics as “truly pernicious” in its potential to obstruct scientific research by needlessly extending the umbrella of secrecy.^{Footnote 72}

Far from a momentary crisis, the events of 1999 sparked years of demoralization and disarray in the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. In addition, since the early 1990s, the ever-expanding legal and regulatory environment surrounding scientific research, proprietary knowledge, and information exchange, which has redefined national security to encompass economic competitiveness and expanded the boundaries of secrecy with new categories of sensitive, yet unclassified, information, has created a dizzying array of new categories of danger and intrigue for the national security state to police.^{Footnote 73} In 1996, for example, a little-noticed law called the Economic Espionage Act escalated the sharing of trade secrets to a federal criminal offense if committed in order to aid a foreign power. Previously, such violations had in most cases constituted a civil, rather than a criminal, offense, and only under state-level statutes. Thirteen years later, in 2009, engineer Greg Chung became the first person ever prosecuted under the Economic Espionage Act when the Department of Justice charged him with passing an extensive range of engineering materials from Boeing to the Chinese aerospace industry. Apparently, although the documents included proprietary information, none of the three hundred thousand pages contained classified information, yet the 1996 law made Chung’s crime into one of espionage without his ever having betrayed official secrets.^{Footnote 74}

Amid culturally laden fears of Chinese espionage, this blurring of the boundary between trade secrets, which formerly stood outside federal legal jurisdiction, and official secrecy has redounded with particularly harsh effect on Chinese American scientists. Although the prosecution of Greg Chung proceeded smoothly, hasty and slipshod investigatory and legal work by the FBI and the Department of Justice has led a handful of recent cases to unravel amid renewed concerns about racial and ethnic profiling. In the most notorious of these cases, in May 2015 federal prosecutors charged Temple University physics department chairman Xi Xiaoxing with four counts of wire fraud related to his supposed transfer of proprietary information about a technology based on his superconductivity research. The case fell apart completely four months later, and only after Xi had incurred nearly a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees to defend himself against charges that threatened up to eighty years in prison and $1 million in fines, when experts finally convinced Justice Department lawyers that the communications in question concerned an entirely different, completely nonproprietary technology. Notably, even in the original indictment, the technology in question was unclassified and involved no compromising of state secrets. The new, intertwined legal relationship between national security and proprietary information, however, has vastly increased the range of persons now potentially vulnerable to charges tantamount to espionage, and it has led Chinese American scientists and legal experts, as well as Asian American members of Congress, to suspect the Department of Justice of unfairly targeting Chinese Americans for espionage-related prosecutions.^{Footnote 75}

In the period since the Wen Ho Lee case, the federal government has also responded to persistent concerns about Chinese espionage by enacting increasingly tight controls on information and an ever-proliferating series of arcane rules that govern foreign researchers and students. As John Krige has recently observed, this regulatory regime has turned knowledge and ideas into “exports” that fall under export control rules originally designed for technological devices, and in academic settings, post-9/11 visa rules have tasked universities with a complex tangle of laborious monitoring and reporting requirements about foreign students’ and visitors’ general activities and access to technology and data. Not surprisingly, understanding exactly what is and is not allowed in this regulatory environment is extremely difficult. Universities must now allot significant expenditures for legal and technical staff dedicated specifically to compliance, and they risk potentially high costs for violations. The penalties include fines and imprisonment, which can mean ruin for individuals, as well as the loss of federal research dollars for strapped academic institutions. Not surprisingly, individuals and universities do their best to err on the side of extreme caution, in an environment that turns every foreigner into an object of suspicion, even though the vast majority of foreign students and visiting researchers are simply trying to pursue ordinary lives and careers. As a result, self-censorship, physically segregated facilities, second-class academic status for foreign students and researchers, and the inability of personnel even within the same laboratory group to consult freely with each other now permeate research communities whose work falls within increasingly broad categories of unclassified but sensitive knowledge.^{Footnote 76}

Nor do government agencies necessarily find the system any less confusing. For example, as Krige has noted, in November 2013 NASA barred Chinese scientists from an innocuous meeting about the latest scientific findings from the Kepler space telescope, based on a misunderstanding of a 2011 law that imposed short-term restrictions to keep NASA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy from bilateral meetings with Chinese government officials or representatives of Chinese companies. That ban, which was buried in a standard spending bill, constituted just one small part of the mystifying legal architecture that currently governs the regulation of scientific information.^{Footnote 77}

This is the house that secrecy has built: a place that has undergirded the power of vernacular knowledge in its institutionalized uses and its role in the broader political sphere, and that has created social worlds where distrust and suspicion of entire populations form a way of life. Of course, espionage is real, and it demands policy responses.^{Footnote 78} But low knowledge is equally real, and gossip, rumor, insinuation, innuendo, stereotyping, and other vernacular means of making sense of social and political reality are not simply “weapons of the weak,” but well-established tools of the political elite and the state. As Alfred McCoy observed in Policing America’s Empire, the nexus of surveillance and state power has a long history in the United States: “This clandestine apparatus and its anonymous apparatchiks provide an invisible thread of continuity that ties together the draconian security of World War I, the postwar repression of militant labor, Japanese American internment during World War II, and the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. Although American historians have often treated each episode as specific to a short-lived period, throughout this entire half century the same state-civil nexus emerged to shape events, sometimes by empowering civilian adjuncts, sometimes by enfolding these networks into an expanded system of state security.”^{Footnote 79} Low knowledge permeates institutions, rules, laws, mental images, folkways, cultural tropes, and history, and the extensive rule-making of recent years, far from rationalizing the system, has instead expanded the legal and political terrain in which vernacular understanding operates.

In their zeal to embrace the imagined possibilities of objective, value-free, and scientific forms of inquiry to transform public policy, few policymakers or scholars ever acknowledged that modern state practices could also rely upon deliberately subjective, highly localized, and value-laden types of knowledge.^{Footnote 80} Nick Cullather, in a fascinating and important preliminary study of the idea of “central intelligence,” has captured the loftiness of expectations surrounding the status of objective fact in a new age of information. Starting in the 1920s, a wide array of American academics, public intellectuals, and policymakers aspired to capitalize upon the new technological possibilities for reproducing and disseminating texts by creating novel bureaucratic systems to gather and sift through massive amounts of material. In a world of readily available information, in which modern communications combined with punch cards, microfilm, and other new technologies for the immediate reproduction and dissemination of factual knowledge, the nation’s political leadership could confidently make decisions based on “an objective, factual view of international affairs” derived from appropriately scientific forms of expertise. As formalized central intelligence emerged in the 1940s, the new national security bureaucracy anticipated that the enormous flow of information and data would feed a new era of understanding, precision, and command.^{Footnote 81}

That new information order, however, proved far more unmanageable than its inventors ever predicted, partly because of the political aspirations and ideological motivations of key individuals, but also because raw facts themselves came in such diverse and unruly forms. It is tempting to blame the shortcomings and abuses of the surveillance state on the intentions of bad actors, especially when figures such as J. Edgar Hoover offer such rich material to work with. But the apparatus of the state also possesses inertial tendencies, by which the prolific bureaucratic machinery creates its own reality and thereby extends itself. In his account of colonial policing in the Philippines and its domestic equivalents in the mainland United States, McCoy suggestively hints at how the act of constant surveillance and amassing of information establishes an echo chamber that amplifies the perception of threats’ omnipresence, thereby sustaining the will to maintain and expand counterintelligence and counterespionage efforts far in excess of the actual dangers.^{Footnote 82}

McCoy’s insight applies with equal validity to the Cold War and the more recent era. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very institutionalization of a massive bureaucracy to protect state secrecy reinforced the perception of a world of threat. Similarly, one could say that the post–Cold War regime of secrecy has actually expanded the number of security threats, simply through the legal redefinition of some forms of larceny that were once straightforward theft of intellectual property, but now constitute espionage, with all of the betrayal of state and nation that the term implies. In addition, the minute and cumbersome regime of secrecy and export control regulations virtually guarantees violations and thereby itself manufactures the appearance of leaky institutions in need of ever more rigorous regulation and oversight.^{Footnote 83} To that extent, the security state becomes a perpetual motion machine whose feedbacks maintain its continued operation. This special issue focuses on “governing the security state.” The deeper questions, however, may have to do with the national security state’s ungovernability, and the extent to which it instead governs us.