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Chapter 8 meditates on what it calls documentary ‘dispersion’, considering whether new markets, technologies, and social challenges can be met through documentary's distinctive modes of address and filmmakers' ongoing efforts to engage with and influence the social imaginary. Given the ever-broadening range of documentary production and consumption, this chapter focuses more narrowly on a pressing issue taken up by recent documentary: the representation of US wars, and in particular the Iraq War. It includes a close reading of Fahrenheit 9/11.

This chapter discusses the benefits of quiet diplomacy in comparison to open diplomacy, focusing on the highest levels of the international system. It examines the different types of diplomacy and provides historical examples. The authors argue that although secret diplomacy is never ideal, it is sometimes necessary for the safe resolution of international crises. Further, open diplomacy—something Woodrow Wilson explicitly demanded in his Fourteen Points—has certain downsides that must be acknowledged, especially in the era of cyberhacking and mass manipulation of public opinion. The chapter concludes by pointing out that there must be a balance between openness and secrecy, as certain negotiations must remain confidential to ensure international security.

This chapter critically discusses how the formation of ethical subjectivity today must be considered in conjunction with the technopolitics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratisation’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structures of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory (a theme developed and contextualised further in the following chapter.) Levinas argues that ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’. In view of Derrida's account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, this chapter proposes way of thinking the ethico-technopolitics of secrecy and disclosure in the age of ‘big data’ in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that.

Chapter 8 examines the case of the Russian partisan intervention in the 2016 U.S. elections in light of this book’s arguments and the currently available information. It first analyzes the causes of this intervention, finding preliminary support for the theoretical framework on why such meddling occurs. It then studies the effects of the Russian covert intervention on the election results, with the main focus on the hacking and document-leaking component, using multiple methods: estimating their effects using PEIG and aggregate data from the U.S. in 2016, two pre-election surveys with relevant questions, and Google search data on these leaks in the U.S. and the key “swing states.” It finds that the Russian intervention had a significant pro-Trump effect on the results and it was probably large enough to have led Hillary Clinton to lose at least 75 EC votes—sufficient to lead to her defeat in the electoral college.

On April 3, 2010, WikiLeaks and the Sunshine Press released the Collateral Murder video: a 17-minute clip showing a US Apache attack helicopter firing upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst those killed by the 30mm cannon fire were two Reuters journalists. Rooted in the author’s earlier work on the use of YouTube by US soldiers to record everything from the criminal to the light-hearted to the banal, the chapter addresses how this clip (viewed over 15 million times on YouTube, and with myriad copies throughout the Internet) has been used and re-used for a variety of activist purposes over the past 4 years, and how it has contributed to a temporal extension of ‘the battlefield.’ Rather than a somewhat static memorialisation or transcription of war, the Collateral Murder video has been more fluid: entering and re-entering public consciousness as it is linked to news events as they unfold. This chapter discusses the flow and distribution of activist imagery as it is connected to the flow of news and current events.

This chapter concentrates on technological innovation lead by the CIA, particularly those of the digital era. Key here is the relationship between the CIA and industry. It examines how the CIA started a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, In-Q-Tel, to learn from the centre of technological development. The chapter then discusses internal changes as a result of technological change: the renaming of the Information Operations Center to the Center for Cyber Intelligence and the creation of the Directorate for Digital Innovation. The chapter then considers the work of this new Directorate, and the challenges CIA has faced in adapting to the age of the internet, including, notably, the challenge of preserving security and preventing leaks. Document: CIA Statement on Claims by Wikileaks.

This is the first career interview with Academy Award–winner, Pulitzer Prize–winner, MacArthur Fellow Laura Poitras, whose shift from cooking to filmmaking brought her first into contact with the avant-garde filmmaking community in the Bay Area, and in particular, with Ernie Gehr; then into contact with Linda Goode Bryant, with whom she made Flag Wars (2003), an Emmy-winning documentary about ethnic collisions in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. Her reaction to the American response to 9/11 instigated her celebrated post-9/11 trilogy of films: My Country, My Country (2006), which explores events during the election in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; The Oath (2010), a portrait of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s one-time bodyguard; and CITIZENFOUR (2014), where Poitras worked with Ed Snowden to reveal unconstitutional surveillance practices. Her feature about Julian Assange, Risk (2016), followed. In 2015, with Charlotte Cook and A. J. Schnack, she founded Field of Vision to provide independent documentary filmmakers with a platform for their work.

This chapter summarizes past and current case law concerning one of the last-born colonies of our times, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Created—and depopulated—for the sole purpose of accommodating a strategic US military base, the territory has since generated extensive litigation in the national courts of the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as proceedings in the European Court of Human Rights, an ongoing arbitration under Annex VII of the Convention on the Law of the Sea (Mauritius v. UK) and a potential dispute over continental shelf claims (the United Kingdom, Mauritius and the Maldives). The principal actors, besides the governments involved, have been the Chagos islanders, whose exile from their home archipelago has now lasted more than forty years. The material analysed and referenced in this note covers a range of legal and historical sources documenting the underlying disputes.