William Vandel and the 274 Photos of a Sanitized Occupation
Kept secret in a personal album, the record of C.I.C. Area No. 21 replaces the reality of forced purges and interrogations with images of "peaceful hills" and green tea.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Information Warfare
USIA’s Commemorative Books Mask a Decades-Long War of Influence
Glossy photographs and staff reminiscences are being used to bury decades of information warfare as the USIA prepares for its final absorption into the State Department.
By Constance Bell ·
Eisen Jr. and the 1995 Shift to State-Sponsored Netwar
The 1995 manual for attacking enemy networks moved cyber-warfare from the fringe to the bridge, while the actual targets remained hidden in classified annexes.
By Harlan Pryce ·
The Nuclear Silence of DEFE 44/325
A technical intelligence report was scrubbed from the UK National Archives, leaving a bureaucratic void where the secret of a foreign nuclear capability once sat.
By Roy Castellano ·
Ted Phillips and the 1997 Mapping of Information Warfare
While the government fought to break encryption in 1997, a consultant for the intelligence community was mapping the gaps in our privacy—a plan kept unclassified only in its most sanitized form.
By Miriam Adler ·
Lt. Col. Michael J. Thompson and the 1997 Fight Over Who Owned the Internet's Failures
Kept unclassified but vague, a 1997 report on the National Information Infrastructure masked a widening gap between federal warnings and a military pivot toward offensive cyber-war.
By Miriam Adler ·
Paul Cabral and the 1998 Map of Digital Vulnerability
The Army's 1998 strategy for 'protecting' the web masked a deeper interest in how to dismantle it, leaving the public's data exposed to the very agencies claiming to shield it.
By Miriam Adler ·
Howard and Longstaff's Blueprint for Sanitizing Nuclear Breaches
While the FBI tracked hackers attacking the Air Force in 1998, Sandia researchers built a system to scrub the gore from security failures, keeping the true scale of nuclear vulnerability in the dark.
By Eleanor Voss ·
Thirteen Recommendations for a Digital Battlefield
Behind the unclassified veneer of a 1996 defense study lies a calculated effort to secure massive funding for an era of warfare that remains largely invisible to the public.
By Miriam Adler ·