Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America

"Today the activities of foreign scientists, especially from countries seen as adversaries, are policed by US "deemed export" regulations that treat every communication of formally unclassified but controlled technical information as if a physical export had occurred. Considerable effort is devoted to regulating the flow of sensitive but unclassified knowledge, and the state has developed instruments like export controls and visa policies to restrict access to it. In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show that export control regulations have had enormous political relevance for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only-and not even the most important-regulatory instrument that came into being in the post-war era"--