Freedom through Education: The Sunflower County Freedom Project

The United States intelligence community is an integral part of the security of our\u27 nation. It has been continually growing and redesigning itself for the past 230 years to suit the needs of the people and of the nation. Inhibiting the American intelligence system, however, is the struggle for the U.S. to find a balance between the rights of the people and the security of the nation. This struggle has been at the basis of change in almost every instance of intelligence redesign. It is these changes that have become the study of this thesis. Major trends found in the redesign of the U.S. intelligence system can be categorized in three ways. First, early American intelligence history shows the common mindset that intelligence was needed only in times of war. Were intelligence used in peace time, it would be a breach of the people’s rights to privacy as well as a breach of trust among nations. Second, as the nation evolved and became embroiled in more and greater conflicts, the people realized that it was necessary to not only have intelligence during wars, but also, in order for war time intelligence to be most effective, it had to remain flmctioning during peace time. It was essential, however, that these new, full time intelligence units severely limit their capabilities and functions during peace time. Finally, it has only been in the last sixty years that intelligence units have existed and functioned both during times of war and of peace. Vitally important to the study of these changes in attitude towards intelligence are the three common threads which are found throughout history. These threads which bind the history of intelligence redesign include: 1) Change to the intelligence community V comes on the heels of intelligence failures; 2) Intelligence failures occur because of the lack of cohesion in the intelligence community; 3) The lack of cohesion stems from the inherent American struggle to find a balance between rights and security

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

The College News, 1944-03-15, Vol. 30, No. 19

Bryn Mawr College student newspaper. Merged with The Haverford News in 1968 to form the Bi-college News (with various titles from 1968 on). Published weekly (except holidays) during the academic year

The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

This dissertation examines the origins of political and scientific commitments that currently frame cryptography, the study of secret codes, arguing that these commitments took shape over the course of the twentieth century. Looking back to the nineteenth century, cryptography was rarely practiced systematically, let alone scientifically, nor was it the contentious political subject it has become in the digital age. Beginning with the rise of computational cryptography in the first half of the twentieth century, this history identifies a quarter-century gap beginning in the late 1940s, when cryptography research was classified and tightly controlled in the US. Observing the reemergence of open research in cryptography in the early 1970s, a course of events that was directly opposed by many members of the US intelligence community, a wave of political scandals unrelated to cryptography during the Nixon years also made the secrecy surrounding cryptography appear untenable, weakening the official capacity to enforce this classification. Today, the subject of cryptography remains highly political and adversarial, with many proponents gripped by the conviction that widespread access to strong cryptography is necessary for a free society in the digital age, while opponents contend that strong cryptography in fact presents a danger to society and the rule of law. I argue that cryptography would not have become invested with these deep political commitments if it had not been suppressed in research and the media during the postwar years. The greater the force exerted to dissuade writers and scientists from studying cryptography, the more the subject became wrapped in an aura of civil disobedience and public need. These positive political investments in cryptography have since become widely accepted among many civil libertarians, transparency activists, journalists, and computer scientists who treat cryptography as an essential instrument for maintaining a free and open society in the digital age. Likewise, even as opponents of widespread access to strong cryptography have conceded considerable ground in recent decades, their opposition is grounded in many of the same principles that defined their stance during cryptography’s public reemergence in the 1970s. Studying this critical historical moment reveals not only the origins of cryptography’s current politics, but also the political origins of modern cryptography

The Art of Manipulation: Agents of Influence and the Rise of the American National Security State, 1914-1960

Throughout the twentieth century, British and Chinese agents of influence, fellow travelers and their unwitting allies conducted political warfare campaigns designed to exploit America’s rising xenophobia to achieve specific diplomatic goals. The result of these “friendly” political warfare campaigns led the United States to not only fight in two world wars but also lead to a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and domestic policy. By creating a culture of fear, these political warfare specialists influenced the U.S. political climate making it amiable toward their respective governments’ diplomatic agendas. These foreign agents infiltrated the media, created front organizations, and quietly worked behind the scenes to shape American foreign and domestic policy. During the First World War, British intelligence played on American fears by suggesting that “hyphenated” Americans might be treasonous. Patience, luck, and nerve finally paid off as a reluctant president asked Congress to declare war. Two decades later, England, once again, found itself embroiled in war. By the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill, the newly appointed British Prime Minister, knew the only way the British Empire could survive was to drag the United States into the conflict. Using the lessons learned from the Great War, British intelligence began working to drag a reluctant nation to war. British agents of influence suggested that German Fifth columnists working on American soil sought to undermine the nation. The fear of subversion helped to shift U.S. attitudes. The British were not the only nation struggling to survive. Half a world away, the Chinese fought Imperial Japan, and like the British, the Chinese began lobbying the United State for support. The British and the Chinese competed for American aid. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did not end this competition nor did the defeat of the Axis powers. As the “Good War” ended, the British and the Chinese worked to ensure that U.S. aid would help rebuild their shattered economies. The blowback from these operations led the rise of the American national security state. This is the story of how these agents of influence and their domestic allies worked to change the course of a nation.History, Department o

The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project is a book of lyric poetry that chronicles the discovery of nuclear energy and its subsequent use as both a weapon and a fuel source. The book is grounded in the aesthetic positionality contained in scholar Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of the ‘necropastoral’, a liminal zone where disparate spaces, such as the classical `urban` and `pastoral`, become blurred. The Manhattan Project examines the enduring impossibility of sufficiently responding to the continuing repercussions of the nuclear age and its post-nuclear contaminants through a kind of `resurrection` of lyric meditation, further mutated by both formal constraints and conceptual frameworks