Should a government tell its citizens what it is doing secretly on their behalf to keep them safe, when it might end up harming them too? Strangely it is a question still rarely asked in the debate over national security in the United States, eleven years into its long War on Terror. Might, for instance, Barack Obama’s pseudo-secret drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen be dangerously radicalising the families of fallen civilians even while eradicating the immediate threat of plots to attack Americans in their offices and homes?

Kristen Iversen has lived with the consequences of a lack of curiosity. In 1952, as Winston Churchill was making Britain the third nuclear power with an atomic bomb test off Western Australia and the US was electing Dwight D Eisenhower to crusade against communism, a factory sprang up on the