Description
States face a strategic paradox when considering the public disclosure of intelligence: preserve operational security to protect sources and methods or disclose to gain immediate strategic advantages. This article develops a formal model to explain official public intelligence disclosures (OPID), the deliberate declassification and official release of sensitive intelligence for strategic gain, as a function of states’ shadow of the future. Specifically, the model conceptualizes OPIDs as an expected utility optimization problem within a costly signaling framework. In technological regimes characterized by rapid obsolescence and high technological turnover, states discount the costs of disclosures heavily, as the value of secrecy declines for collection techniques with temporally-limited utility. The model articulates five benefit categories and four cost categories and includes an innovation that captures temporal discounting based on intelligence method obsolescence rates. The model is then evaluated against historical cases spanning 1950-2022 producing the conclusion that disclosure decisions follow predictable patterns, predict an increasing frequency of OPIDs, and sets the foundation for future research in intelligence studies.
