We’re leaking, and everything’s fine: How and why companies deliberately leak secrets (original) (raw)
Related papers
Information misbehavior: How organizations use information to deceive
JASIST, 2023
Recent examples of organizational wrongdoing such as those that led to the opioid crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown show that organizations can deliberately use information to deceive others, resulting in serious harm. This brief communication explores the role of information in organizational wrongdoing. We analyze a dataset consisting of 80 cases of high-penalty corporate wrongdoing in the United States in the period 2000-2020. Our analysis of documents filed by the US Department of Justice and federal regulatory agencies in those cases found that organizations use two general information strategies to deceive and mislead. First, organizations can "sow doubt" on statements by others that hurt the organization's interests. Second, organizations can "exploit trust" that others have placed in them to provide truthful information. Our analysis suggests that which strategy is adopted depends on the degree that the organization's external information use environment is "contested" or "controlled." Across the cases examined, we observe three types of information behaviors that implement the strategy of sowing doubt and exploiting trust: information obfuscation, information concealment, and information falsification.
Current Anthropology, 2019
Contests over the control of information are central to the perpetuation and critique of militarism. This article examines one of the most prominent sets of state document leaks in recent political history: the online posting of hundreds of thousands of US war logs and diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. Bold statements were advanced in 2010 and afterward regarding what these releases made visible. In contrast, this article considers how disclosure and nondisclosure came bundled together. With reference to the tensions of keeping secrets and producing transparency, I suggest that the promise attached to the released documents did not just derive from the argument that they revealed modern statecraft, nor that such knowledge was tantalizingly out of reach, but from the manner in which what had been rendered knowable could be revisited over time. Through this argument I want to explore the affective knots, conceptual tangles, and problematic story lines associated with exposing militarism.
Organization Studies, 2014
This paper brings into focus the concept of organizational secrecy, defined as the ongoing formal and informal social processes of intentional concealment of information from actors by actors in organizations. It is argued that existing literature on the topic is fragmented and predominantly focused on informational rather than social aspects of secrecy. The paper distinguishes between formal and informal secrecy and theorizes the social processes of these in terms of identity and control. It is proposed that organizational secrecy be added to the analytical repertoire of organization studies.
Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing
Social Research: An International Quarterly
I) Reflections on Secret-keeping and Identity In the "national security" area of the government-the White House, the departments of state and defense, the armed services and the "intelligence community," along with their contractors-there is less whistleblowing than in other departments of the executive branch or in private corporations. This despite the frequency of misguided practices and policies within these particular agencies that are both more well-concealed and more catastrophic than elsewhere, and thus even more needful of unauthorized exposure. The mystique of secrecy in the universe of national security, even beyond the formal apparatus of classification and clearances, is a compelling deterrent to whistleblowing and thus to effective resistance to gravely wrongful or dangerous policies. In this realm, telling secrets appears unpatriotic, even traitorous. That reflects the general presumption-even though it is very commonly false-that the secrecy is aimed not at domestic, bureaucratic or political rivals or the American public but at foreign, powerful enemies, and that breaching it exposes the country, its people and its troops to danger. Even those insiders who have come to understand that the presumption is frequently false and that particular facts are being wrongly and dangerously kept secret not so much from foreigners but from Congress, courts or the public are strongly inhibited from speaking out by an internalized commitment to keep official secrets from outsiders, which they have promised to do as a condition of employment or access. To be sure, there are strong, usually more than adequate careerist incentives not to break those promises. Being found to do so exposes officials to loss of access to meetings and information, loss of clearance, demotion or loss of promotion, loss of job or career, loss of retirement benefits, harm to marriage or to children's prospects that comes with loss of income, even danger of prosecution and prison. The last risk is much less likely than they are led to believe-at least, that was true prior to the present Obama administration-but the other job-related penalties are not, and they prove more than sufficient to keep most secret-keepers from breaking the rules in ways that would expose them to such losses, even when the welfare of many others is at stake. However, as a former insider I can attest to psychological dimensions of this behavior that seem rarely to have been discussed. They seem worthy of some extended reflection here, given my own motive to understand this behavior in order in some respects to change it. In my experience, the psychological stakes for officials in keeping their commitment to keep secrets-even what appear to be "guilty" secrets that not only preclude democratic accountability but endanger the welfare of many people-go beyond careerist calculations of keeping a job or possible punishments for disobedience, influential and even sufficient as those considerations generally are. The promise to keep "secrets of state," once demanded and given, becomes virtually part of one's core identity. In the national security apparatus, one's pride and self-respect is founded in particular in the fact that one has been trusted to keep secrets in general and trusted with these particular secrets. Second, they reflect one's confidence that one is "worthy" of this trust. Indeed, the trust (with respect to truly sensitive secrets, requiring utmost reliance on the discretion of the recipient) will have been "earned," before being conferred, by a long history of secret-keeping, building habits that are hard to break, that form part of one's character. These habits will allow a good deal of leeway and discretion in disregarding formal rules of the classification system when it comes to sharing information with others who have not been explicitly authorized to receive it-even reporters who have not been formally cleared, in flat violation of the rules-when this is in the interest of furthering the policies or interests of one's agency boss or the president.
2012
On January 3, 2011, three managers from the French car manufacturer Renault were accused of having received large sums of money, allegedly for having sold proprietary data to a foreign company. They were offered the opportunity to quit discreetly, the alternative being a formal complaint and subsequent police investigation. However, the affair quickly went public and gained extensive media coverage. Renault officially filed a complaint and the CEO was forced to go on TV on a major channel. The three managers denied any kind of misbehavior and in return filed a complaint against Renault. The police investigation found no evidence of any kind against the three executives; instead, it revealed that the whole affair was probably a scam designed by a member of the manufacturer’s security service. Significant amounts of money had been spent on collecting fake evidence about secret bank accounts allegedly possessed by the three managers in Switzerland and other countries. Renault’s CEO rea...
Organizational secrecy as viewed by the agents of a multinational corporation: A Case Study
Gestão & produção, 2021
Only a limited number of theoretical studies have been conducted with regards to the issue of organizational secrecy. This study examines similar and different views about secrecy within three executive levels of an industrial multinational organization named Motores. This is achieved through a case study for which the data has been collected by using a survey-like questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The different maturity levels and process structures in the enterprise account not only for different stages, concerns, and types of knowledge involved in addressing secrecy, but also for the role boundaries among the agents surveyed. Furthermore, while these agents are well acquainted with suppliers and customers, whereby confidentiality is ensured through confidentiality agreements (NDAs) and patent protection, their relationships with institutions and organizations appear to be areas of little or no knowledge, especially when it concerns competitors, class entities, and government relations. Leaks of classified information occur, and the places and situations where they may take place are identified. No potential mitigation situations were identified in our case study, and no systemic protocol exists for dealing with classified topics in the different areas where secrecy is involved, including business strategies. Transparency is recognized and desired; however, its risks and consequences require evaluation.
A Different Look at Sticky and Leaky Knowledge: Economic and Industrial Espionage
The primary objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of interorganizational learning; in particular, of the concepts of 'sticky' and 'leaky' knowledge. By drawing upon data from, hitherto, a largely unexplored area of management and organization studies, that of economic and industrial espionage, we attempt to demonstrate that contemporary debates could benefit considerably from an exploration of such illegal forms of learning. Three vignettes involving economic and industrial espionage are presented to demonstrate the limitations of both our current conceptualisations of inter-organizational learning and what motivates people to illegally acquire knowledge across organizational boundaries. In direct challenge to the dominant 'black-box' view of organizations presupposed by the sticky and leaky knowledge debate thees vignettes present powerful evidence of external forces encouraging the forced leakage of knowledge. Resultantly our understanding of what constitutes sticky and leaky knowledge has to be adapted. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications for future research
Traditionally, answers to the question “What causes a security breach in the intelligence community?” have tended to focus on individual-level factors including an individual’s economic circumstances and/or psychological health. But less emphasis has been focused on understanding other factors including organizational and management patterns which might create patterns of treason or information theft. This paper seeks to go beyond ‘orthodox’ explanations of treason and information theft through treating them less as idiosyncratic problems which exist only within the security community. Instead, this paper suggests that deviant behavior patterns within the intelligence community can be understood through borrowing from the literature on public administration and management. This literature provides three alternate models for identifying and exploring organizational factors which serve to encourage or allow individual corruption and mismanagement – a ‘deviant behavior within organizations’ approach; a corruption approach and a ‘white collar crime’ approach. This new explanatory framework has implications for the future practice of counterintelligence.
Knowledge hiding in organizations
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2012
Despite the efforts to enhance knowledge transfer in organizations, success has been elusive. It is becoming clear that in many instances employees are unwilling to share their knowledge even when organizational practices are designed to facilitate transfer. Consequently, this paper develops and investigates a novel construct, knowledge hiding. We establish that knowledge hiding exists, we distinguish knowledge hiding from related concepts (knowledge hoarding and knowledge sharing), and we develop a multidimensional measure of this construct. We also identify several predictors of knowledge hiding in organizations. The results of three studies, using different methods, suggest that knowledge hiding is comprised of three related factors: evasive hiding, rationalized hiding, and playing dumb. Each of these hiding behaviors is predicted by distrust, yet each also has a different set of interpersonal and organizational predictors. We draw implications for future research on knowledge management.
Damming the Leaks: Balancing National Security, Whistleblowing and the Public Interest
2015
In the last few years we have had a number of infamous national security leaks and prosecutions. Many have argued that these people have done a great service for our nation by revealing the wrongdoings of the defense agencies. However, the law is quite clearthose national security employees who leak classified information are subject to lengthy prison sentences or in some cases, even execution as a traitor. In response to the draconian national security laws, this article proposes a new policy which fosters the free flow of information. First, the article outlines the recent history of national security leaks and the government response to the perpetrators. Next, the article outlines the information policy of the defense industry including the document classification system, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), whistleblower laws and the Espionage Act. Finally, the article outlines a new policy that will advance government transparency by promoting whistleblowing that serves the p...