Despite the welcome turn within security studies towards a more material- and practice-oriented understanding of state secrecy, the ways in which security actors experience, practise and negotiate secrecy in their everyday work lives has been rather overlooked. To counter this neglect the article calls for attention to everyday secrecy. Focusing on a former top-secret weapons research facility in the UK called Orford Ness, it uses oral history to give an account of ex-employees’ memories, experiences and practices concerning secrecy. Such a focus reveals that subjects make sense of procedures and rules of secrecy in ways that are sometimes surprising and unexpected. Ultimately this perspective emphasizes that secrecy is not just what governments and organizations prescribe and proscribe; it is also shaped by subjects who negotiate these rules. Everyday secrecy matters: as a perspective it shows that secrecy is not simply imposed by states and organizations from ‘above’; it is also made from ‘below’, albeit very asymmetrically.

中文翻译：

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日常保密：冷战期间绝密武器研究机构的口述历史和社会生活

尽管安全研究中对国家机密的理解转向更加注重物质和实践的理解，但安全行为者在日常工作中体验、实践和协商保密的方式却被忽视了。为了对抗这种忽视，文章呼吁注意日常保密。它以英国名为 Orford Ness 的前绝密武器研究机构为重点，利用口述历史来讲述前雇员关于保密的记忆、经历和做法。这种关注表明，受试者有时会以令人惊讶和出乎意料的方式理解程序和保密规则。归根结底，这种观点强调保密不仅仅是政府和组织规定和禁止的；它也由协商这些规则的主体形成。日常保密很重要：从一个角度来看，它表明保密不仅仅是由“上层”的国家和组织强加的；它也是由“下方”制成，尽管非常不对称。