Tag: espionage

“If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know too. That can be dangerous.”

“Weiss…a subtle, under-the-radar bureaucrat who fought his country’s adversaries with red tape and a headful of contrarian ideas. I understood him as a man whose entire life was secrets. “

The “United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets.”

The world’s intelligence agencies send operatives to scientific conferences to collect information and protect themselves.

Why then does the American public still consider all spies to be demons? Why does the public make no distinction between technical spies like Julius Rosenberg stealing useful knowledge and tactical spies like Kim Philby destroying human lives? Perhaps it is because the American public is misled by the American secrecy system. The secrecy system is a bureaucratic monster that classifies vast quantities of information as secret, making it impossible for the ordinary citizen to see the difference between important and unimportant secrets.