Blank Spots on the Map | Trevor Paglen | Talks at Google

Hello everyone welcome to today's authors of google event uh it's my pleasure to introduce trevor poglin the author of blank spots on the map trevor holds a phd in geography from uc berkeley uh his writings have appeared in the village voice the san francisco bay guardian and he's the author of two previous books torture taxis and i could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me uh which is a pretty Awesome collection of patches worn by confidential military units um he also has an art show opening tonight as the sf moma

and i would encourage you guys to check it out but please join me in welcoming trevor poglin to google and thank you so much for having me it's great to be here it's really fun it's really fun um today what we're going to talk about is State secrecy and kind of blank spots on the maps and these kinds of things we're going to talk about the secret part of government the secret part of the state that we all live in and this might seem this is a rather strange place to start and it's kind of

hard to start a conversation about this stuff to begin with but i think a place that we can start to See this secret world or to think about what state secrecy is is let's follow the money let's take a look at the defense budget um the united states is very curious in the sense that it is at once it can be a very very secretive society at the same time it is also one of the most open societies in the world there's something called uh article 1 section 9 of the us constitution which has a

clause in it called the receipts and expenditures Clause which says that you as a taxpayer get to see the receipts of all your money that congress spends congress has to report to you on how they spend tax money this is a kind of a foundational idea behind the liberal you know the idea behind liberal democracies as a result of that you can actually download the military budget and this is kind of astounding but that's because of this clause in the constitution and when you download the military budget This is what it looks like when you

get the pdf you have a line item where it tells you the amount of money they want to spend and then they give you a description of how they want to use the money this is a typical line item this is one for 12.3 million dollars and what they want is uh money provides unit and field service equipment to enhance soldier efficiency effectiveness and sustainability items include laundries latrines and Showers which directly affect combat readiness and sustain combat power by promoting wellness and preventing disease so the language is quite colorful here you know we need

we need this is the budget for toilets the army wants 12.3 million dollars for toilets we need these toilets to enhance soldier efficiency and sustain combat power in the like i think this is what the founding fathers had in mind with that receipts And expenditures clause you as a taxpayer get to see the line item for toilet expenditures for the war on terror but there's another part of the defense budget when you go a little bit further into this you find this section r d t and e which stands for research development test and evaluation

and some of the line items in here look rather different there's something called pilot fish with A budget of 132 million dollars retract large 89.6 million dollars retract juniper what's with that 1.5 million dollars and it goes on and on like this these strange code names with uh with you know millions of dollars assigned to them and no corresponding justification now there's other things in here as well there's something called special Activities and right here we actually have a blank spot in the budget there's a it's a there's a blank spot it doesn't tell us

what the line item is selected activities here we have another blank spot in the budget and these blank spots are all over the place as well combined advanced applications humans classified programs special program these are all blank spots in the budget here's the budget for the national Security agency they report one line item of 394.3 million dollars the rest is a blank spot here's a budget for an outfit called the national geospatial intelligence agency this is an agency that's dear to my heart it's the pentagon's geography department and your entire budget is a blank spot

if you look at the defense budget particularly over time you'll find thousands and thousands of these code Names these strange projects now one you know i do i have a phd in geography from uc berkeley and uh one of the i do human geography like cultural geography so what cultural geography is really about is the ways that human activities sculpt the surface of the earth and how in turn Human activities are sculpted by the surface of the earth so we look at the feedback loops of humans doing things out in the world and the things

that we've done out in the world then setting possibilities and constraints on what we do in the future so we call that dialectics right dialectic one of the axioms of this kind of geography of human geography when you start to look at money is that money Doesn't disappear into a vacuum when money gets spent it doesn't get you know sent in a rocket up to the sun and burn up but instead it produces space as the language that we would use and what i mean by that is that the how money gets spent sculpts the

surface of the earth money congeals into the surface of the earth i think all of us in our mind's eye can perhaps see this process at play in housing markets or in real estate Markets you can see fluctuations in mortgage rates interest rates and you can see that almost directly translate into suburbs being built buildings going up suburbs being abandoned foreclosed on so again that's an example of these economic fluctuations you know congealing into the surface of the earth and i want to submit to you that something similar is true of this secret money of

these millions and millions of Dollars that we just saw it's a budget between 30 and 60 billion dollars when you add up the intelligence budget and you add up this secret part of the pentagon budget and this money also congeals into the surface of the earth a lot of times this money congeals into places in the southwest various research institutions military bases places like los alamos obviously Places like vandenberg air force base which is like uh that's where they launch spy satellites for example um places like groom lake nevada which is a kind of a

classified flight test facility out in the middle of the desert where they fly secret airplanes uh beale air force base the home of reconnaissance squadrons and so on and so on now a lot of defense spending congeals into The southwest so much so that economic geographers talk about the southwest as being kind of gun built right and and it's kind of interesting when you look at the history of the southwest that there's a kind of a cultural resonance between its history as part of the frontier and perhaps the the this gun belt that we have

now this is a map of nevada from 1963 after had it had been a State already nevada had already become a state and here we have these vast unexplored regions in the south and this is about 50 years before conrad wrote heart of darkness which is kind of the archetypal book about blank spots on maps where did this how did this start where did this stuff come from when we have you know perhaps these historical echoes of the frontier And of these historical blank spots on maps but really the the crucial moment in the creation

of this world is the second world war right world war ii huge huge industrial undertaking the whole nation is mobilized to do it the whole economy is mobilized you have a lot of research and development going on you have projects like this this is a secret project called project xp 59a or for the it was the first jet fighter right And they would when they would tow this thing around they would put a fake propeller on the front because of course a jet could not fly without a propeller but a landscape had to be created

for this secret jet fighter if they were going to build it they needed to have a secret factory they built that in buffalo new york but they needed to test it they needed to fly it somewhere so they needed to have a Secret air force base they built a secret air force base in southern california and tested this thing and to that to this day that air force base remains a secret air force base it's part of the edwards air force base complex a place called north base and to this day everything that goes on

there is classified it's a very very restricted part of a much larger base The paradigmatic project was of course the manhattan project i mean this was billions and billions of dollars going into the manhattan project manhattan project had its own factories its own pseudo universities it had its own air force its own security details its own police i mean it really was a world unto itself in many many ways and after the second world war of course None of this really goes away a lot of parts of the the war mobilization morph into what eisenhower

famously called the military industrial complex upon leaving office in 1961 and as a subset of that military-industrial complex we have various kinds of secret projects secret programs you actually obviously have nuclear weapons development you have things like spy satellites These are cia spy airplanes called a12s um this real this world really gets a boost of adrenaline when when these guys come to power in the 1980s uh the reagan administration was really really fascinated by what they called silver bullet technologies and these would be highly secret technologies uh vastly expensive very very uh using very very

high technology the idea was that they Would be they would win the cold war right and so during the reagan administration uh we find all of these projects like stealth fighters and stealth bombers uh star wars uh advanced uh spy satellites this sort of thing i mean there really is a kind of an explosion of high technology and a vast increase in the amount of money that is spent on secret projects That money that's being spent on secret projects during the 1980s begins to you begin to be able to see it in all of all

sorts of different kinds of places it starts to create a culture around it people if you look at the defense industry journals and that sort of thing in inside trade publications people start talking about something called a black world and what is this black world this black World is the economy and the landscapes that are being produced through this tremendous expenditure of secret money here's a biography of a test pilot a guy named doug benjamin and it has a curious line in his biography there's a line that says benjamin then moved to the black world

where he flew on and commanded a variety of classified programs as if there was this secret world that one could move to Here's a guy named dan vanderhorst another test pilot who's been the lead pilot on seven aircraft to date with many private successes he has made his career in the cockpit of so many classified aircraft there's not much we can say about him on the record his work has been outstanding and will probably never be recognized by the general public now a biography like this on on the face Of it might seem a little

bit absurd and might seem to actually tell us nothing but i think that the kind of blank spots perhaps in his biography actually do tell us something first of all he's been though this is one guy who's been the lead pilot on seven classified aircraft to date to give you a little bit of historical context there have been three previously classified prototype aircraft that have been subsequently Declassified one was called have blue one was called tacit blue another one was called bird of prey these were all manned aircraft so the fact that he's flown seven

tells us something about the historical record it tells us that the declassified record we have with regards to these projects actually represents the exception to the rule rather than the rule itself i think a lot of us have the idea that you know The yeah sure they do secret projects a couple years later they declassified it everybody knows about it well this right here shows us that that's not true at all this also tells us something about the scale of this world think about what again here's one guy who's flown seven secret aircraft think about

what goes into building an aircraft i mean this is an unbelievable design challenge technical challenge Industrial challenge i mean you have to have factories to do this you need to have huge amounts of money building and flying an aircraft is something that a lot of countries could not afford to do and here we again we have one guy who's flown seven of these things it implies secret factories and and flight tests and that sort of thing think about the infrastructure that goes into aviation And finally this tells us something else which is a about social

engineering that there's a kind of social landscape i've spent years and years looking at this material and i could not tell you what any of these aircraft are really don't know really don't know have some guesses but no confirmations and that's remarkable to me it's remarkable To me that you can have projects on that scale again of building aircraft and actually keep them secret i mean this is an extraordinary feat not only of technical engineering but of cultural and social engineering how can you have this much money these many people working on these projects and

actually does remain secret so for the rest of the talk i want to explore that a little bit i want to talk about If we can see references to this secret world if we know that it's out there how can we see it how can we go about trying to understand something that is being hidden from us how can we go about seeing absences right seeing secrecy in a sense and i would submit to you that to try to do this we might try to imagine ourselves as astronomers and use this as a metaphor and

what i Mean by that is that if you talk to astronomers or cosmologists or read you know popular literature about cosmology or astronomy you'll see lots and lots of references to things called dark matter and dark energy and it turns out you know that a huge amount of the universe has to be composed of something we don't know what it is right if you look for example at a spiral galaxy and you See it spinning around and measure how it's spinning around it turns out there's not enough visible mass in that galaxy to keep it

from flying apart it should fly apart and the only way it can hold together like that as is as if you know 90 something percent of it has to be made of something we don't know what it is but we can detect it by the gravity gravitational force that it exerts on the visible universe so we can see That it's trace in the visible universe although we can't see it directly and i think that something might be true as well of this secret world and i think that that might be true because i think that

there's an original contradiction in this secret world and it is that it this secret world has to be made of the same stuff that the rest of the world is made out Of right if you're going to have a secret airplane you're going to have to have a secret factory to build it in well you can't make a factory invisible right i mean that factory's got to look a heck of a lot like a non-secret factory right it's got to be made out of the same stuff and one of the physical properties of matter is

that it reflects light right so right there secrecy is bound to fail Right you just you can't make something disappear really so secrecy is the project of trying to make a fundamentally visible world disappear and and i think that from that original contradiction all sorts of other contradictions arise and if you're able to find the places where this secret world intersects with the visible world a place where there's a contradiction between the two and perhaps you can start to outline these blank spots on Maps and thereby get a negative image of what this world might

look like so i want to talk about some of the contradictions in this world that have been very very helpful to me in developing various projects one has to do with logistics if you talk to people in the military people who are planners that sort of thing they say one of the cliches that you hear is that amateurs talk about strategy and Professionals talk about logistics and what that means is that you know if you're going to invade a country or have a war plan sure you need to have a strategy but what's really really

hard to do in terms of having a campaign is figuring out how to feed people on the front lines figuring out how to keep all the trucks fueled and that sort of thing and that's what really that's really where the action is it's in the logistics not you know Figuring out some secret strategy it's figuring out how to keep the machine running and if you have a kind of secret world then you need to have some kind of secret logistics one of the one crucial component of any kind of logistical infrastructure is probably going to

be aviation you have airplanes flying around delivering things moving Things around and one of the classic ways that you do logistics in secret or do a lot of different covert actions that sort of thing is it used front companies right a lot of us have heard about you know secret you know cia front companies like dummy corporations a valerie plame the the cia agent who was famously outed ostensibly worked for a company called brewster jennings she Didn't work for brewster jennings she worked for the cia but on her paycheck it may have said brewster jennings

now to do uh so this is a classic way to do things now the problem as far as these contradictions are concerned is that even if you're setting up fake companies that you're going to run actions through or do logistics through those fake companies have to file all the same kinds of paperwork that any other Company has to file and when you look at something like the aviation industry if you're setting up civilian companies that are aviation companies you generate a huge paper trail that's because the aviation industry is highly highly regulated for very very

good reasons and a lot of documents involving the aviation industry are public so The problem is this you're going to assume you assume that aviation is going to be a part of the logistics of that secret geography what you need to figure out is out of the millions and millions of companies in the world how do you identify the ones that you think are these cut outs are the fake companies and this is again where you start to imagine where other contradictions might Be here's a document that the army publishes or kind of used to

publish called the civil aircraft landing permits document and what this is was a list of all the civilian aviation companies who have permits to land at military air bases and what air bases they have clearances to land at there's another document that's similar to this that it has all of the civilian companies who have accounts to buy fuel At military air bases and when you start to look at this you see some interesting things you see companies like elasti alaska airlines for example who has clearances to land at military airfields in the continental us and

in alaska and what we can surmise from that is that the army probably has some kind of contract with alaska airlines where they can move troops around that sort of thing this is quite normal Also on this list you'll find things like fedex dhl companies like that that would be delivering to military bases but you also find some stranger things you find companies like this one stevens express leasing who have a worldwide landing clearance this means that they can land at any military air base anywhere in the world this is remarkable richmore aviation again a

worldwide landing clearance is a company you've Never heard of who can land at any military base anywhere in the world rapid air trans path corporation premier executive transport services now it turns out that this document is a rosetta stone of sorts to the civilian companies that are doing some of this logistical work premier executive transport services in particular was uh is kind of infamous in some circles is providing the kind of Workhorse aircraft for much of the cia's extraordinary rendition program the program of of grabbing uh terror suspects from around the world and either taking

them to countries like egypt or syria where people would be tortured or bringing them to a network of secret cia prisons around the world now once you've identified these these cut out aviation companies you can start to get a lot of information About them one of the things you can do you okay you can go back to the federal aviation administration and you say here's the names of some companies i'd like to know the registration numbers and serial numbers of all the aircraft that they own to go to the faa and then you get a

list back of all the aircraft that these companies own then you can take those registration numbers and you go back to the faa and say here's a bunch of registration numbers i'd really Like to see all of the flight records that you have for these aircraft and you can go back to them and you can get a list of all the flight records that they filed with the federal aviation administration when you do that you get things that look like this this is an aircraft that says landed iad which means the aircraft landed at washington

dulles gives you the date and the time Other bgrs bangor maine e-i-n-n is a flight plan to shannon ireland right there mugm up there is a flight to guantanamo bay now on the other hand you can look at the anatomy of these companies themselves again these companies have filed all kinds of paperwork in order to kind of exist as a company here's the letterhead of premier Executive transport services this company that did much of the provided a lot of the aircraft for the rendition program and premier executive transport services has an address 339 washington street

suite 202 dedham massachusetts so that aircraft company is called headquartered in this building uh on the second floor in this building this is in suburban boston here in the law offices of of hill and Plakius attorneys and this is rather strange this doesn't look like the headquarters of an aviation company and when i went to hill in plaquius and asked about premier executive transport services they promptly threw me out these companies have boards of directors like any other company here's someone named colleen bourne someone named brian dice the person named james kershaw And then a

character named tyler edward tate if you haven't surmised already from looking at their signatures these are not real people these people are ghosts tyler edward tate has a birth date in the 1950s but has a social security number that was issued in the 1990s when you look up these people you will find that they have no credit history never got married never bought a house never had a loan Don't really have a any of the kinds of records that all of us generate you know every few minutes in our own lives you do find one

thing that they tend to have in common and that will be that their only address will be a po box somewhere in the dc or northern virginia area this is a popular po box for these people to live 221 943 box 221 943 is where a number of these people seem to live together And so if you do a reverse record search on this po box you find that it's very very crowded indeed there are almost 200 names of people who supposedly live here ad hoc geospatial intelligence so coming back to this idea of contradictions

what are the ways that this secret world intersects with the visible world all around us Again from from looking at our logistics what we can do if we got we go back and look at all those flight records from the aircraft we identified we can start to generate a map based on that data and what we can say it's something that looks like uh something analogous to the in-flight map you might fly find if you're you know flying to new york or something like that you might open up you know united airlines magazine they'll have

a little Map telling you all the places that they fly well maybe you could do that with premier executive transport services and these other companies as well in fact you can and you start to see patterns you start to see places where they'll fly over and over again one of the the big questions over over the last eight years for people that look at this stuff is where are these people being held In in terms of the rendition program in particular the question was where are these cia black sites as they call them where are

these secret prisons and you had a couple of different kind of disparate pieces of information can you could look at all these flight patterns here's a map that a guy named holly almazri drew who was a guy who was kidnapped by the cia in macedonia And held at a prison for several months and they finally decided they had the wrong guy and they dumped him off the side of a road in albania he went to his lawyer and and started talking about what had happened he did wasn't able to process a lot of it he'd

been you know blindfolded for much of the time you know had uh been shackled and hooded drugged and so he could remember various things but he Didn't have a complete picture of even what had happened to him but he had drawn a map of what he uh of the the prison that he thought he had of what the prison looked like that he'd been held in and what so you had that and then you could see you know for example he said he was kidnapped on a day in early 2004 in macedonia and then you

could have look At the flight records and it turned out there was a flight record for the same day that he was kidnapped from macedonia to kabul afghanistan via baghdad and that was actually interesting because that was a little bit counterintuitive in this in this sense it might seem obvious that if you're going to have like a network of secret prisons one place that you'd want to do It is afghanistan okay fine but to see a flight plan to kabul is actually interesting because if you were the military or the cia presumably you'd fly to

bagram and bagram is really the big base there not kabul kabul is more of a civilian aircraft airport so haley al-masri said he was taken to afghanistan the flight record showed that he went to kabul and he said he was thrown in the back of a truck and driven for 10 minutes and at The end of this drive they arrived at one of these black sites the secret prison and so i worked with a friend of mine an investigative journalist named ac thompson on a lot of this and we did something rather simple which was

to look at this a map of the area around the kabul airport and say hey where could you go in about 10 minutes and when you did that You find this building in the just northeast of kabul kind of out in the planes by itself and then we thought well that looks a lot like you know the map that he drew and so we we flew out there and hired a driver and we drove out there and it was it was kind of an interesting moment on the drive out to this black site which is

we kind of left kabul behind us and the road kind of starts to deteriorate and there isn't much out there there's a Lot of smoke in the air from different brick factories which seems to be the main thing and uh and there we come across a traffic jam now it's not cars though it's a it's a herd of goats right there's this whole herd of goats going across the road taking forever it takes us a long we're waiting waiting and the goat herders is old very traditional afghan guy with long robes and big beard and

everything We're watching him and we notice he's wearing a baseball hat well that's weird i mean this is a very traditional looking guy out here herding goats wearing a baseball hat and he turns around and on the baseball hat are the initials k b r which stands for kellogg brown and rude which is of course construction company that was a subsidiary of halliburton which was dick cheney's company so that was an interesting Moment right here we are on the middle of nowhere afghanistan next to a place that we think is a secret cia prison and

as a goat herder wearing a hat with dick cheney's old company's name on it um so this is this is a photograph of this of this of this black side the code name of this one was supposedly the salt pit and this is where a lot of these ghost prisoners had been moved through over the course since september 11th Coming back to this this idea of contradictions in this secret world we have to remember that this world is made out of people all right people work in this world people make this world happen and people

are unbelievably self-contradictory things right working in secrecy is it can be very very alienating this imagine having a job where you can't go back to Your family in the evening and say what you did that day in some cases you can't even say where you may have gone to work that day one guy told me about working in this world he said you know if you want to work in this secret world you have to look your mother in the eye and lie to her he said that's what it's like to work on these kinds

of projects and so you can imagine that If you work in this world it's only really the other people around you that you work with who know that part of your life who can even recognize you know what what you're good at or what your talents are and so there's a tremendous kind of camaraderie that often develops among people that work in this world and people don't work in this world forever people retire move on to other different kinds of jobs and when they do that they Do the same kinds of things that we often

do they'll have things like alumni associations you know clubs they'll have conferences they'll have things that you know they'll come back together their families and and and see each other again and these are not held you know at secret military bases or something like that they'll be held like at a hotel room in lancaster or somewhere out in The desert and that sort of thing las vegas is a popular place of course and you can go to these things and you can talk to to these guys who are having a reunion but there's a funny

thing that happens which is there's a kind of a crisis of language at some of these alumni associations because a lot of times people will be gathered to see each other for a reason that they can't really talk About that much and so you have uh people getting awards for significant achievements at remote locations and all sorts of strange things like this you know what everybody's humping and if you're not on the inside it sounds very very bizarre this is a a commemorative paperweight celebrating 50 years of air force flight test center detachment 3 which

is Actually the air force name for area 51 this is a secret base in nevada this is a commemorative paperweight it's a black world now if you've ever been around the military at all or done that kind of work or had family members in it you know that the military is uh there's a there there is a huge visual culture to it right and that that visual culture is uniforms posters things t-shirts that sort of things but A huge part of it is patches right and people have patches to tell you you know what their

rank is which units they belong to which projects they work on so on and so forth and it turns out that they also make patches for black projects or for secret programs and it's something very very curious happens which is that oftentimes there are patches which point to things that are secret and there will be clues In the patch to what the secret thing is but it won't tell you exactly what it is so very very strange um a friend of mine saw who works at edwards air force base saw somebody show up on base

with this patch in the towards the late 1990s went up to the guy and said hey you know what's uh what's the bird of prey program i've never heard of that and the guy turned around and said oh well i could tell you but then i have to kill you but There's a clue in the patch to what the program is and my friend looked at the patch and he said well you know clearly it's a it must be an airplane project i mean we're here at edwards air force base and the the diamond shape

there's a there's a lot of uh you know stealth ideas for stealth airplanes that look like diamonds so probably the the shape of the patch is uh represents the shape Of the airplane and this bottom part where you know there's the black part maybe that's where the the engines are or something like that that might make sense so maybe the patch looks like the airplane well he was almost right bird of prey if you'll remember was one of these three previously classified aircraft that were subsequently declassified and when boeing declassified it it looked like this

Look at the handle of the sword and handle of the sword maps onto the shape of the aircraft this is an outfit called the special projects flight test squadron and this is a secret flight test squadron so these are flight test pilots who only fly secret airplanes and when you look at their patch we have this sword here that has that has the bird of prey sword they flew bird of prey And then we have here on the left hand side there's a collection of five stars and one off to the side as in 5

1 as an area 51 which is the secret base where this flight unit is based we have their mascot as a wizard and the wizard is holding a weird symbol it's a sigma symbol and what that's a reference to the kind of engineering language of stealth aircraft which is an unknown radar cross-section or unknown return so this in a sense signifies Invisibility the thing falling from the sky is a radar calibration target we have a radar on the ground again this would be very much part of what you'd need to test stealth aircraft then we

have a lightning bolt coming off the wizard staff which often represents electronic warfare the national reconnaissance office we own the night How many people have heard of the national reconnaissance office here in the audience well very a lot more than than usual not more than usual the national reconnaissance office is the secret space agency right so they're like the shadow to nasa right they were they were formed about a year after nasa and the existence of this space agency wasn't made public until 1992 And so for 30 something years we had nasa going to the

moon doing all that but we had this other space agency too that only did secret stuff and to this day they declassified the name in 1992 but to this day everything they do is still secret they of course do spy satellites now it turns out we own the night this is an interesting project how if you are in the business of spy satellites are you Going to see at night and that's what this project implies with the owl eyes and with the phrase and it turns out that a lot of these national reconnaissance office projects

are like shadow projects to different nasa projects nasa had a project called magellan which went out to venus and mapped the surface of venus and to do that you know venus is covered with clouds and that sort of thing so you needed to do something Where you could see through the clouds the way they did that was using something called a synthetic aperture radar bounce radar waves off the surface and get the image back using synthetic aperture radar you can see through clouds and you could see at night now it turns out there are a

number of magellan-like spacecraft in orbit around the earth that are operated by the national reconnaissance office they're called lacrosse or onyx Spacecraft and on this patch the orbital inclinations of these spacecraft were accurate so this actually represented the um the accurate you know orbital inclinations of these classified spacecraft here's a picture of of one of these onyx class spacecraft that i took from the roof of my apartment and it's the streak here in the night sky Oh here's another one this is onyx 5. this these uh visual language of these projects often tell us something

about the culture of them this is a lifetime of silence behind the green door and we have a star here in the southwest and another star in the sky and we have this phantom figure with a dagger tastes like chicken that's what the latin says and again we have our familiar symbol Here there our sigma symbol or invisibility now some general saw this patch and got very very upset about it and said you can't say classified flight test on the patch that's a operational that's a breach of security you can't do that so guys in

the unit had to change it to serve man this is one of my favorites it sums a lot up for me They're there this is for a a secret spacecraft um there was a code name that was something about uh by man improved crystal dragon which had to do with the infrared sensor on the keyhole reconnaissance satellite this patch is actually not probably not from that program but maybe made me think about i mean here we have a dragon we have a diamond or an improved crystal something like that and Giant american flag wings with

the world in its clutches and uh this is a photograph of that uh keyhole improved crystal spacecraft above my apartment rapid capabilities office here we have our our black world in the background we've seen that before doing god's work with other people's money And the classic in the genre don't ask none of your effing business and and finally the kind of to kind of wrap up i want to go back to this original contradiction that i talked about about matter reflecting light about this secret world being made out of the same stuff that our world

is made out of one thing that i wanted to do was to try to see some of these places with my own eyes to try to to photograph some of these uh remote Locations and classified bases and that sort of thing and it turns out that oftentimes there's no place on public land where you can see some of these things particularly the ones in the united states will usually be weighed out in the middle of the desert you really you can't get near them they have huge huge buffer zones around them so what i started

doing i said well i want to Try to see them despite that and so i started using astronomy lenses to try to photograph places that were you know dozens or you know up to 40 50 60 miles away and to try to see these to push vision as far as it would go and and and then taking some of these photographs and doing some of this project i imagined you know if ansel adams had had was using an astronomy lens rather than a wide-angle lens he'd blow up his images thousands and thousands of times Even

and might have seen that the desert was often not really the uh bucolic landscape that he often made it out to be there are all kinds of strange things out there in the desert to photograph this is a classified base in nevada at near the town of tonopah and this image is taken from about 18 19 miles away and what starts to happen when you when you look through these telescopes And you try to see some of these places is that the atmosphere doesn't cooperate with you right the color starts to fall apart the image

you're looking through so much heat and so much haze that when you push your eye that far you see the places that you're trying to see but you also begin to see what the limits of your own vision are the what the physical limits of your own vision are is also what you begin to see the Colors start to collapse light starts to collapse at some point around 40 miles or so we are really threatened by abstraction right when we push our sight that far images really collapse and around 60 miles uh vision collapses completely

into what are essentially color fields and so i think for me the this collapse of vision is A metaphor of one extreme of looking at the secret world the more you look at it the less distinct it is the harder it is to make any sense of it and there's a kind of epistemological collapse but i think that there's also another direction that this world collapses in the longer that we look at it or the closer that we look at it what i'd like you to do is In your mind's eye let's think about again

back to this rendition program i'd like you to imagine what does a rendition team member look like who does that person look like whose job it is to go around the world and kidnap somebody and have them tortured somewhere just imagine what that person looks like you may have imagined someone like this you probably did not Imagine this woman anne linda jenkins you probably also didn't imagine cynthia dame logan or maria luanna betts these are very ordinary people and when i talk about vision collapsing it collapses into this kind of abstraction but it also collapses

into a vision of everyday life the longer that we look at this secret World at the end of the day airplanes you know always come home and people that get out of them and get in their trucks and drive the same cars that we drive and go out and watch the same movies that we watch and eat at the same restaurants and drink the same starbucks coffee and do this and that and the more that you look at this secret world it's very very hard to tell for me Anyway the difference between the secret state

and the rest of the country as a whole i'll leave it at that and thank you so much for having me today if well i mean it's it's anything i mean i've been working on this for years and years you know and so a lot of it is you know we we actually didn't look at that much secret stuff today i mean we looked at a lot of public stuff which Has to do with secret stuff right but i don't have an image of what a lot of these secret airplanes look like for example we're

looking at like around that world and what that looks at so that's a lot of it you know um the other other part of it is persistence and the other part of it is talking to people i've interviewed lots and lots of people who work in this world and again they're you know with the patches for example People are proud of the work that they've done even if they can't necessarily talk about it so oftentimes someone will say well i can't tell you know what what i did for a living but hey look at this

no i can't tell you what it is you know but uh but you know the patches themselves are not technically classified right so again it's kind of the refuse around these these projects that somehow speak to Them yeah um so the uh talk radio has um conspiracy theorists and art bell and they talk about area 51 and all of that is there a thread of truth and all of that is that what your research is pointing to okay yeah so that's a really really good question um area 51 is a very funny thing i i

i was Interviewing a guy who'd worked there for a long time and you know of course you have to ask him you know so what about all these ufo rumors and that sort of thing and he said you know what those ufo stories about area 51 are the gods gift to the air force and the reason for that is because they made it so that anybody who looked at it was crazy right i mean it really i mean that was The that's the language that we have to think about a lot of this stuff is

that language of conspiracy theory and like little green men and and black helicopters that the u.n is going to send and take over and and that sort of stuff so it it's very very difficult to even have the language to approach a lot of this stuff and that's really one of the the goals of this book in particular was to try to develop a way of talking about some of These things that was you know maybe more reasonable than a lot of the more outlandish conspiracy theory things um but there might be a threat of

truth maybe you know sometimes you get people who talk about stuff and there is something sometimes when there's smoke when there's sometimes where there's smoke there's fire but sometimes where there's smoke it's just somebody blowing Smoke the other question i had about all that is like you were talking about dick cheney and halliburton and all of that it seems like there really is a connection in with businesses and these areas and you know we're just sort of regular people and we don't always think about that but is that absolutely absolutely so when when i mean

you there's a whole chapter In the book which is about the the landscape in northern virginia and about the the fact that this money creates jobs and it creates huge numbers of jobs in this country right now there's about three or four million people who hold security clearances now that doesn't mean that everybody who holds a security clearance you know doesn't work necessarily some black side in the middle of the desert but it but i think It speaks to the scale of this world that that millions and millions of people have some kind of clearance

to work around it or in it in some capacity or another again on this question of scale if you look at the number of documents that are classified every year my friend peter gallison at harvard did a study on this and he showed that more paperwork gets classified every Year than goes into the library of congress every year i mean so it's just an astounding amount of information here as well so i mean it does intersect our everyday lives in all kinds of ways if we if we pay attention to it and that's kind of

what i wanted to get at with those last couple of slides so first let me compliment you on your detective work there's a nothing more fun than like the sort of reveal where you get to the post office box and there Are thousands as somebody who works in the security field like uh that's always it's always nice to have that sort of payoff yeah but um my question for you is um maybe uh a little more uh i don't say crass but direct so i noticed you've taken sort of a documentary or almost artistic approach

to this right we're sort of you you seem to be allowing us to draw our own conclusions but i'm just sort of curious Like you know um seeing what you've seen like you know what would your sort of political response to this be just saying like you know if you had your sort of pick on how we were to run things like uh right do you think this is problematic and if so what what remedies would you uh employ to address the problem if there is one so yeah so yeah that's a very very good

question a very fair question And the question is to to what extent is this a bad thing and and to the extent that it may be a bad thing how could we make it better um i think that secrecy and democracy is a very very volatile combination because i think fundamentally they're at odds with one another right Um so to me it's the idea of having a secret state within the state that we're trying to have it run as a democracy is very is potentially very very dangerous and i think we've seen that uh the

ample illustration of that over the last eight years with things like uh disappearing people torturing people i mean these are the extremes of what Happens you know if you create places where anything is possible anything will happen terrible things will happen this is uh you don't have to have a phd in the social sciences to know that so what i think is that there needs to be more oversight to this there should be some kinds of checks and balances on this secret world in the way that there is in the rest of the world and

this This is actually very very timely because when the obama administration came to power you know it was very much using the rhetoric of openness right away you know let's shut down guantanamo bay let's try to shut down these secret cia black sites on monday or uh in court the other day there was a very very significant trial which was a lawsuit called muhammad versus jepsen and it was five victims of This rendition program people who had been disappeared for years and tortured in in terrible terrible ways were suing a company here in san jose

called jepson data plan who had done a lot of the logistics for for these uh secret airlines and and knew exactly what they were doing you know in terms of organizing these torture flights and the bush administration had been keeping that suit out of court as well as all kinds of other suits involving This world nsa wiretapping for example it was keeping all of these things out of the court system by invoking something called the state secrets privilege and they were invoking in a very very strong way they were basically saying the court case cannot

go forward because that would because in order to have a discussion about that the discussion itself would damage national security and The corollary to that is the judge doesn't get to decide the judge doesn't get to see the secret evidence and make their own judgment it's only the executive that gets to judge itself so there's no checks on that and on monday uh glorious for the obama's justice department said that they were going to keep exactly the same stance in place with regards to this lawsuit and so that was very very troubling to me because

it Seemed to indicate that the obama administration was willing to shut down some of these things on the surface you know like guantanamo bay and like these black sites but seemed willing to keep the underlying structure in place and and to me i was very disappointed by that personally hi um a lot of these this organizing this world is a very dangerous world And um you know what they're capable of or suspect what they're capable of um in your investigation you must have reached a very dangerous point for yourself and your friends right um what

kind of danger do you think you were in and what motivated you to continue um okay so for some of these projects is is not dangerous okay it's just secret So for example if you're looking at you know air bases or aerospace or even spy satellites and that sort of it's not it's i mean they're basically they're secret industries but they're nonetheless they're just as boring as any other kind of industry right the things that are a little bit i mean there's information that's sensitive about them i think it's more when you look at various

parts of the war on terror that That things get a little bit sketchier you know for example looking at a lot of the cia things and particularly just traveling to some of these places can be a little bit sketchy but i actually never really felt in danger and again it comes back to this other contradiction that i mentioned at the beginning about the Fact that the united states is at once has this vast kind of secret architecture in the secret part of the state but at the same time is also one of the most open

societies in the country or in the world and excuse me there is basically no statutory basis for secrecy in the united states what that means is secrecy laws you know all these orders about you know you could if you reveal it going to prison that sort of thing That all just applies to the executive branch that doesn't apply to people who aren't a part of it and this is actually very different than a lot of other countries you know in in in the uk if you did this kind of work you could be prosecuted as

a civilian for releasing some of this information in switzerland a couple of journalists were put in prison for publishing information about some of these cia black sites that's actually not true in The united states and so you do it it is kind of remarkable in that sense final questions well thank you so much for having me i really really appreciate it