This essay investigates justifications for the “necessity” of official secrecy, by tracing and structuring the rationales underlying it. Justifications will be investigated through the case of “national security secrecy,” a prominent example of official secrecy. While the literature generally treats “national security secrecy” as unidimensional, this analysis demarcates several distinct rationales. Specifically, three justifications for national security secrecy are identified: the logic of crisis demanding the suspension of normal democratic processes (threat frame); the need for enabling and enhancing governance (effectiveness frame); and the delegation to and protection of decision makers (elite governance frame). The paper illustrates possible frictions, overlaps, and synergies between different rationales for national security secrecy, thus broadening the existing conceptualization away from transparency and secrecy as direct opposites. It further contributes to ongoing research on national security secrecy from a frame analysis perspective, thus linking theories, justifications, and practices of secrecy.

本文通过追踪和构建官方保密的基本原理，研究了官方保密“必要性”的合理性。理由将通过“国家安全保密”的情况进行调查，这是官方保密的一个突出例子。尽管文献通常将“国家安全保密”视为一维的，但这种分析却划分了几个截然不同的理由。具体而言，确定了国家安全保密的三个理由：危机的逻辑要求中止正常的民主进程（威胁框架）；需要启用和加强治理（有效性框架）；以及对决策者的授权和保护（精英治理框架）。本文说明了国家安全保密的不同理论之间可能存在的摩擦，重叠和协同作用，因此，将现有的概念化范围从透明性和保密性扩展为直接的对立面。它进一步从框架分析的角度为正在进行的国家安全保密研究做出了贡献，从而将保密的理论，理由和实践联系在一起。