“We’re drowning in secrecy, and the lifeguard’s on their payroll.” – The X Files
“Hello, is the anonymous NSA hotline?”
“Yes, John Wilder, how can we help you?”
As near as I can tell, in 1970 the U.S. government was still highly trusted. Sure, there was Vietnam, but we had landed men on the Moon and I’d suggest that, while trust wasn’t as high as it had been in the 1950s with the “super science will save us” feeling that culminated in Apollo, it was still pretty high.
I think the Nixon takedown is when the mistrust started to metastasize, though I’m open to other suggestions. Regardless, this is the time when the lid comes off.
The Nixon takedown was big – the tapes showed Nixon’s complicity in a petty break-in to get information from the Democrats that was entirely unnecessary due to Nixon’s popularity. Plus it was sloppy – I think they picked the locks with Twizzlers™.
But the even bigger impact was a collapse in trust. At least one person who was there at the time, Geoff Shepard, thinks that Nixon was taken down by the security apparatus, more commonly known as the Deep State now when prosecutors colluded with judges and suppressed evidence in order to get Nixon out of office.
Does that remind anyone of the Russian Collusion Hoax?
I bought a toothpaste called “Death”, and now every morning I have a brush with Death.
Add in revelations in the seventies about Operation Mockingbird coming in 1976, where it was alleged that the CIA, operating in the United States, had manipulated the news media (over 400 journalists) to influence the American public. Oh, and the CIA program MKUltra, a program that tested drugs and psychological torture on hundreds if not thousands of unwitting civilians.
Like Ted Kaczynski. If he hadn’t been MKUltra’d, perhaps he would never have developed fascination with the US Postal System.
Nixon’s fall opened the floodgates, and 1976 was the year the dirty laundry really started showing up, skidmarks and all.
Also, in 1976 the Select Committee on Assassinations came to the conclusion that JFK’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, but couldn’t figure out who was responsible. I mean, it’s congress, right?
1976 was a year when trust began to evaporate, and that trust evaporation was really about seeing what people did behind the cloak of secrecy. Gallup™ polls showed that trust in government in that year was 36%, down from 73% in the 1950s.
Some Indian wrote a book for nervous surgeons: The Calmer Suture.
Now, do I believe that secrets can and should exist? Yes, I do. I remember coaching a game of PeeWee football, and wanting to see if a particular trick play was legal, so I went into the rules, and found this gem, “Deception is the heart of football.” I had never thought of it that way, but that’s 100% correct, and the same would be the case in war, so, yeah, there are the need for some secrets.
It’s clear, however, that we’re doing secrecy wrong. I’d like to think that we were on the right track to defang the security state, but it’s actually headed the wrong way. In 2001, the Patriot Act was passed into law in October, not six weeks after the 9/11 attack. The law was 342 pages, and was amazingly complex, since most of what it did was amend other existing laws, you know, turning “shall not” into “shall”.
Don’t worry, though, we’ve got a special court that was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Oh, the FISA court gives the government a yes 99.9% of the time – over 78,000 requests, and only TWELVE denied? Well, they said no at least once, so they’re not a rubber stamp or anything. What’s the motto of the FISA court? “Yes, Daddy.” And you don’t want me to get into what their Tinder® profile says.
In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs. Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post. The revelations were huge: emails, chats, browsing histories of anyone that the FBI or CIA or NSA wanted to look at. And the NSA used the “Five Eyes” sources, so if they were prohibited from snooping on a person, boom, just have the Aussies do it for us.
And it’s certain they are still doing it. Secrecy has enabled these nightmares.
Speaking of still doing it, those 51 former intelligence officials that said Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation? It’s the Security State trying to get its preferred candidate elected. And why are Epstein’s records still not public? Saving it for a rainy day?
I hear that Epstein used to high-five his guards, but the last one left him hanging.
Although I don’t have any evidence for this statement, I am nearly certain that the Deep State is still committing horrors under the cloak of classified information, things that no politician sees. It is certain that this information is used for political blackmail and control on a regular basis.
Paging Epstein, anyone?
The government still echoes the worst of Project Mockingbird, putting pressure on the social media outlets to censor information they don’t like, from COVID to anything pro-Trump. The FBI flagged over THREE THOUSAND accounts for censorship. Secrecy has gone from a tool to keep us safe to a weapon to keep us in line.
The physicist Eric Weinstein thinks that string theory (in physics) was created to stop actual, useful research in physics. Why? To distract the Russians (and now Chinese) because you can’t classify physics, and someone in .gov thinks that there are some significant physics applications they don’t want the world to see, especially related to quantum gravity.
Please don’t ask me where all my cats went.
Do we need to end secrecy entirely?
Certainly not, but when the CIA still holds that lemon juice as invisible ink is a state secret, we live in Clown World. Here are my suggestions:
First, no secrets, at all, after sixty years. Okay, maybe fusion bomb design, but even the Pakistanis can figure out atomic bomb design when they can’t figure out can openers, so we’ve got one secret. Maybe set up a board that will allow one secret per year related to technology that the other side hasn’t figured out yet. But only big things. Like time travel. Or the feared anti-PEZ™ bomb that eats all the PEZ© and leaves small pictures of Rosie O’Donnell everywhere.
Second, after sixty years, absolutely no redactions in the released documents.
Third, someone needs to watch the watchers. There needs to be an oversight board, and protection for whistleblowers like Snowden that show blatantly illegal conduct. How do we prevent them from being co-opted by the Security State? That’s a hard question. Maybe have a clean AI review them?
Fourth, reform and fragment the CIA, the NSA, and most of the FBI. Certainly, take guns away from them (and the ATF, but that goes without saying). After Ruby Ridge and Waco, it’s obvious these children can’t be allowed to play with firearms unsupervised.
We need to break the glowie machine so that it can’t police itself.
The Indian philosopher said: “I think, therefore I scam”.
Transparency in government isn’t a luxury; it is survival for freedom. We need to demand Sunlight. From a CIA document (declassified):
“The free society must have confidence that its oversight mechanisms have adequate access to secret material to make judgements, and that this judgmental process is being exercised independently. There has to be trust that secrecy is not being used against the best interests of the free society; that the activities which are being protected by secrecy are being conducted effectively . . . . It is this confidence and this trust in the oversight mechanisms which has broken down.”
This was made public in 1996, when things were certainly better than they are today.
Me? I think that if we can build trust with Sunlight, maybe well get back to some of that super-science optimism of the 1950s. On to Mars, maybe using quantum gravity propulsion . . . .
In line with Wilder’s Law Of Maximum Amusement, I note that the one fusion bomb secret in America’s possession (the Teller-Ulam design) is the result of immigrants – A Hungarian and a Pole working on the initial suggestion of an Italian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design
Back in the early 1980s when I was working at Y-12 (where I once accidentally left a Secret B-83 design document unsecured overnight, leading to a VERY uncomfortable meeting the next day with the Plant Manager Gordon Fee) I went to Livermore CA on a business trip and walked by Teller in the lobby of a Holiday Inn. Even as a youngster at the time I felt it was very creepy to be so close to the man who one day may be responsible for the extinction of the human race.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/edward-tellers-interview/
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/gordon-fees-interview/
As long as we’re throwing around supposed conspiracy secrets, here’s a good one I recently came across…
https://x.com/RickyDoggin/status/1905275988587794464
“the tapes showed Nixon’s complicity in a petty break-in”
The tapes showed nothing of the sort. They showed he had no knowledge whatsoever of the break-in. The Leftist media and deep state apparatus (but I repeat myself) then conspired to depose him.
Was in college when Watergate happened. The one big thing the MSM & Ds harped on was an 18.5 minute gap of silence on one tape. So, they reasoned that was when Nixon “admitted” that he knew of the break-in’s plans.
Agree that Nixon resigned due to the fact he knew who killed JFK and made a private statement to that effect. Yes, he wanted to retire to NYC and write books, not get his head blown up.
” … the Calmer Suture”
Ha!
That’s got me in stitches!
Your comment about string theory is why I don’t trust the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN. There was such a massive amount of money spent on the large Hadron Collider, that they HAD to find something of importance in order to politically justify the cost. A null result was simply not acceptable.
There was also a book called “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin written about a decade ago that echoed some of the same concerns. He claimed that string theory was mostly just a mathematical construct that was monopolizing almost all research funding and sending a whole generation of physicists down the same rabbit hole .
Smolin never implied that it was intentional misdirection as much as just poor funding choices but I can honestly see it either way. On the one hand, there is a lot of weird black-budget stuff going on these days which suggests some other areas of physics are being explored. But then again I also watched first hand as academic engineering research get destroyed simply by allowing NSF to control what got funded.
J-bird
That was a couple of typos. What they’ve actually discovered is the bo’sun of USS Higgins. When he’s on liberty, that man can drink enough to impress Dionysus, yet he still is fit for duty when his next watch comes around.
Nixon was caught, but for what? Hiding the fact he knew about the Watergate break-in? I think that was only a small part of the reason he was kicked out. As President, he knew more of what the CIA was up to, saw how Kennedy was disposed of, and took the way out that kept him from an early President funeral. The lack of trust was pointed in the wrong direction. Just like it was intended.
“Here are my suggestions:”
All of them restated: “those with power have to voluntarily give up power.” Just like almost all other ‘this is my brilliant idea for saving the system’ plans.
If all of your suggestions were implemented, I’d assume it was nothing more than the security state going even deeper from our sight. That CIA quote about the need for the appearance of propriety doesn’t mean they want to be kept in line, that was an internal memo reminding themselves of the need to keep their power on the down-low.
Brilliant lol
The cat reference reminds me of this tale:
Doctor Schrödinger came home one night to find his wife in a frantic state.
“Erwin!” she exclaimed. “What did you do to the cat? The poor thing looks half dead!”
“If the English language made sense, TRUST would be a 4-letter word.” – Joel Goodsen, Risky Business
In God We Trust all others pay cash.