Mediating Between Security and Innovation: Compartmentalization and its Effects

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - III

Abstract

Designing and building a complex system like an iPhone or a ballistic missile requires stitching together a vast network of public and private organizations while navigating a wide range of markets, legal regimes, and institutions. One problem that these development efforts face is how to align the need for security with the need for innovation. How does one make complex systems, which usually require many hands and forms of expertise, and yet retain proprietary or sensitive knowledge? Although this problem is becoming increasingly visible in the digital era, when information seems to leak more easily, the problem is not new. Through a study of managerial and engineering cultures of two Cold War era military projects, the F-117A Stealth Fighter and the B-2 Stealth bomber, this paper examines one of the central but implicit ways in which security and innovation was managed then. Alongside formal and informal security regulations that surrounded the production process and only hardened once sensitive information was generated—security designations and the regulated circulation sensitive information, organizational cultures of reticence and discretion—was another regulatory device embedded in the production process itself. The division of labor, the segmenting of tasks in the quest of expertise and efficiency was also a division of knowledge. The division of knowledge embedded within practices like systems engineering helped compartmentalize knowledge at a variety of registers. I argue that the rationalities of compartmentalization and their effects are central to understanding the nature of production then and now.

Author

• Mihir Anil Pandya, California State University, Long Beach