I really don't understand the all or nothing argument.

Can you genuinely not envision a situation in which we would need secrecy for at least a time? If for nothing else, to protect the people who are looking out for our interests overseas? Like it or not, covert operations and intelligence is important to the long-term operations of a sufficiently large entity. How else will we know what our enemies are planning?

I would argue that your view of 'no secrets at all' is just as ridiculous as the government's current approach to our data. It's incredibly naive and comes across as sophomore-level debate. Saying that we can have no secrets is giving up embedded operatives dealing with people who genuinely have bad intentions. Saying that we can have no secrets would have dramatically changed the outcome of the landings at Normandy and WWII in general.

That black and white style of argument is ridiculous; that's what I'm saying.

> If for nothing else, to protect the people who are looking out for our interests overseas? Like it or not, covert operations and intelligence is important to the long-term operations of a sufficiently large entity.

Just because that's the way things have always been done, does that make it a requirement? Why do we need to spy on others? Why do we need to launch covert attacks on others?

> Saying that we can have no secrets is giving up embedded operatives dealing with people who genuinely have bad intentions.

Yes, I understand that.

> Saying that we can have no secrets would have dramatically changed the outcome of the landings at Normandy and WWII in general.

Did it really? I mean, none of that was do to the Axis powers pretty much dropping the ball and fighting a battle on two fronts and a Führer who didn't listen to his generals (yes, partially because he believed the disinformation we fed)? I'm not saying that secrecy wasn't important to how D-Day was done or Operation Fortitude (the deception operation done before Neptune). We did, however, loose heavy casualties in it and the Germans couldn't move their equipment fast enough to combat us for reasons I said earlier.

It wasn't simply that we kept it a secret and it went off without a hitch.

> That black and white style of argument is ridiculous; that's what I'm saying.

I agree, however, defining that gray is extremely tough. We have attempted to define it in a very narrow context, and look what we're dealing with now. Absolutes are ridiculous, abuse of power because grey is hard to define, though, is bad as well.

Which is worse? A government unable to take secretive (hostile) action against other states (or it's own citizens), or one in which we have mass surveillance, secret (kangaroo courts), torture, and secret executions of people not deemed by a public court to be a threat?

There was a raging argument in German high command about the best way to combat allied landing. The key sticking point was whether extremely forward placement of troops (and tanks) was better than rear placement where initial sea bombardment could be avoided. The air supremacy enjoyed by the allies made rear placement tricky, as movement of troops was limited during daylight. Neither option was great. Rommel lost out and many troops were held in reserve back from the coast. However he was further hamstrung by Hitler keeping key units in reserve after the initial landings as he feared a second landing at the Pas de Calais. Had there been certainty about the landings, reserves could have been appropriately placed ahead of time and the Atlantic wall further bolstered (it was build pretty damn fast anyway). The bad whether at the time hampered landing of equipment and supplies and a big German push could have been very effective. Secrecy and deception were key parts of the plan and contributed in a big way to keeping decent numbers of German troops away (operation Mince Meat is fascinating - a dead man made a very significant impact on allied success http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat). While having 2 fronts was a problem for the Germans, the western front wasn't the problematic part. The war was lost on the eastern front. Not the best source, but it is a short answer that in congruous with other stuff I have read. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_of_the_German_casualties_...

> Which is worse? A government unable to take secretive (hostile) action against other states (or it's own citizens), or one in which we have mass surveillance, secret (kangaroo courts), torture, and secret executions of people not deemed by a public court to be a threat?

Which is worse? A bullet in the head, or a malignant, metastatic, but slow-growing cancer? Neither is good, you understand, but if I'm forced to choose between them, I'll pick the more survivable one every time.

I guess you're saying not being able to conduct covert action against other states (and your own citizens) is like taking a bullet to the head, in that it's fast and offers no hope, while the increase of mass surveillance is like a slow-growing cancer that you can hopefully survive.

I think they are both like slow-growing cancers, and that both can be survived. Maybe overt actions are enough. I don't think the situation today is similar to WWII.

Certainly the situation today isn't similar to World War II. But that's not the only sort of situation in which covert intelligence is of value; how better, after all, to know what overt action to take?

It would certainly be very convenient if secrets were unimportant in a war, or in contests between adversarial nations generally. Everything above-board, all cards on the table, eh?

However, as other comments have mentioned, that certainly wasn't the case in either of the World Wars, especially the second one. And it probably hasn't been the case in almost any war.

There are two basic problems with your thread of argument:

1. No modern government of importance will give up dealing in secrets, and

2. No government of importance has ever tried.

So if the only hope is that governments swear off secrets, I think most would agree we're out of luck.

Fortunately, there are probably other options besides the either-or choice of "no secrets" or "our current worsening dystopia."

> Fortunately, there are probably other options besides the either-or choice of "no secrets" or "our current worsening dystopia."

I agree. We need to work to find a better choice. However, I believe the better options fall closer to absolute transparency then they do the current system.

> There are two basic problems with your thread of argument:

> 1. No modern government of importance will give up dealing in secrets, and

> 2. No government of importance has ever tried.

That's part of the problem. Simply because everyone thinks it's OK for governments to deal in secrets makes it OK. Noöne seems willing to conceive of a system where secrets are the exceptional, special case and not the norm.

And yeah, I'm not sure why I was trying to say secrets weren't important even after I said myself secrets and deception (helped/caused) conflict about where to place troops for the Germans.

We can't avoid the collection of secrets without talking about the power of secrets. Governments collect secrets because uncollected secrets can actually be very powerful.

One of the sources of power that a secret gives you is the element of surprise.

Probably the scariest instance of this, to a government tasked with providing security to its citizens, would be a unique, valuable operational capability, particularly one that has to do with technology, that one country develops in secret.

They are paranoid about this because of the lessons of the 20th century. Sonar, fighters with jet engines, radar, and so very many other things. All the way up to something as dramatic as the atom bomb. All were secret at some point, and all conferred tremendous exclusive operational advantages at one point.

So that's one extreme and obvious example of the value of secrets: secret operational capabilities can mean that when conflict comes between nations, the nation with no idea of its neighbors' secrets could be terribly unprepared.

There are solutions to that that could avoid the need for secrets, but they're impractical: stop having wars, or get all nations to tell each other what their capabilities are (and would they be believed anyway?)

Looking for and collecting lots of secrets is the only way that governments striving for security can do their job, because you don't know what you don't know. Unless you look.

That's a big problem. And changing that value proposition seems unrealistic for humans -- or at least, it seems like the kind of change that hasn't happened since they started living in groups!

Realistic solutions to the problems raised by the Summer Of Snowden probably have more to do with drawing lines about what secrets are out of bounds, and trying to establish better oversight, than in trying to get rid of Intelligence by making governments transparent.

> Simply because everyone thinks it's OK for governments to deal in secrets makes it OK. Noöne seems willing to conceive of a system where secrets are the exceptional, special case and not the norm.

This is frankly confirmation bias. Secrets are the exception in our government, and in most governments, because they are by nature public entities. It's just that you place very little value on the other information out there (and so does the government, and so do other governments, which is why they're not secret in the first place).

The topic of these conversations starts out with the presumption that the secrets are the important bits to discuss. That makes it incredibly difficult to recognize the presence of other pieces of information right in front of your eyes, because it looks like background noise.

Unlike mr_luc, I do have a solution, but it's not a politically feasible one: a world government. There's a quibble there about the need for things like wiretaps for law enforcement, but I'd be willing to bet that it's a lot less necessary to have operational security even for things like that.

> I mean, why not though? Why is it OK for the government to have any secrets?...Maybe we shouldn't be sending out special forces teams or covert operatives.

This gets at the heart of the issue. As I mentioned in my parenthetical above, the arguments in favor of operational security are only relevant if you assume operations are happening in the first place. If you philosophically reject all warfare, espionage, and law enforcement, then there is no legitimate reason for a government secret. However, it's no light matter to reject those things altogether. It implies a society whose structure is fundamentally different from our own. I'm not saying it's impossible (nor am I saying it is possible), just that we're now tremendously magnifying the scope of our claims. We're no longer talking about a particular government policy (nuclear launch decisions), but a complete rewrite of society from the ground up.

> Or perhaps systems should be built with redundancy and decentralization. It shouldn't be up to any one person to make the decision to launch a nuke, or any other attack. We have methods such as Shamir Secret Sharing that would require multiple people to agree to something before being able to provide something to authorize a use of force.

That doesn't address the problem the White House faced in the Cold War. Namely, how do you ensure the nuclear deterrent is credible even when lines of communication have broken down? If you rely on Shamir Secret Sharing, then retaliation would be impossible if the secret holders are unable to communicate with each other.

> Unless that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is the government going awry and surveying it's entire populace and killing its citizens without going through any process set down by the constitution of said country. In that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is it really OK to be giving the government more power and leeway while decreasing the transparency?

You're shifting the meaning of "worst-case scenario." I used the term to refer to a physical threat, external to the government, which the government is responsible for defending against. You're using the term to refer to a pathology of the government itself. So, the scenario you envision is not the one to which I was referring.

>If you philosophically reject all warfare, espionage, and law enforcement, then there is no legitimate reason for a government secret.

Law enforcement doesn't need to be based on secrecy. I never said you have to broadcast that you're investigating someone, just that the information about who, how, and why you're investigating someone be reasonably public (going through real courts to get warrants and such).

As for war, if we're in a defensive war we can chat about not letting the army put their immediate plans up for all to see.

Ditto with the case about the Olympics in a sibling thread. I see the usefulness in _short-term_, someone's-life-is-in-danger (not because the state put them there), secrecy.

> That doesn't address the problem the White House faced in the Cold War. Namely, how do you ensure the nuclear deterrent is credible even when lines of communication have broken down? If you rely on Shamir Secret Sharing, then retaliation would be impossible if the secret holders are unable to communicate with each other.

The basic idea would be to have redundancy in channel, location, mode, since we're talking about a case in which the chain of command's top has been ripped off leaving many higher-ranking officers at the top of the new chains. An attacker wouldn't be able to take out all (all routes for all modes all over the US) of the communication network simultaneously, especially if we're not talking about superbly massive bombings in which case there would/should be detection.

Also, to be credible, you're assuming the US is telling other's about their system (so that the USSR knows/will think that it can't simply take out the president and there won't be retaliation). Otherwise it's all just based on speculation and in terms of deterrent doesn't matter what the actual system is.

So instead of saying "in a communications breakdown everyone does what they think is best, so someone is going to retaliate" it's "there can't be a communications breakdown because of redundancy in mode, route, and location; so in the event of a collapse of the chain of command, it can only collapse so far and hence retaliatory action is still possible."

This just seems better in practice as well. There is the Dr. Strangelove example of someoene just taking power, and one can also imagine that someone innocently loses communication and assumes the worst.

> You're shifting the meaning of "worst-case scenario." I used the term to refer to a physical threat, external to the government, which the government is responsible for defending against. You're using the term to refer to a pathology of the government itself. So, the scenario you envision is not the one to which I was referring.

Why must it be external, though. Both you and I are concerned about how the government should operate in a manner that protects the populace; I'm just saying that from the populace's POV, the government is/can be an external threat. Look at Kiev right now.

Yes, there will be (exceptional) times when secrets are needed; I get that. Those should be exceptions, and not the rule, as it feels like it is now.

I just think that erroring on the side of transparency, and not doing actions that would otherwise be limited by that transparency (e.g. covert operations) is the better option in terms of dealing with external _and_ internal threats than is secrecy.

Also, an ideal would be for emergency measures to simply flow from the normal operational measures. In the nuke example, forcing some sub-set of commanders to agree that they've received orders to launch nukes (and by implication of participation agree with them and have verified them) before nukes could be launched. The emergency situation is now simply that instead of confirming an order from above, they confirm that they all agree that the situation is such that they should launch.

> Law enforcement doesn't need to be based on secrecy. I never said you have to broadcast that you're investigating someone, just that the information about who, how, and why you're investigating someone be reasonably public (going through real courts to get warrants and such).

There's a difference between judicial oversight and public oversight. The court may issue a wiretap authorization, yet that will probably remain secret for as long as it's in effect. Otherwise, the wiretap will be largely useless. You can't go to your local courthouse and demand a list of currently active wiretaps. It's not public record.

> The basic idea would be to have redundancy in channel, location, mode, since we're talking about a case in which the chain of command's top has been ripped off leaving many higher-ranking officers at the top of the new chains. An attacker wouldn't be able to take out all (all routes for all modes all over the US) of the communication network simultaneously, especially if we're not talking about superbly massive bombings in which case there would/should be detection.

What you're proposing is maybe practicable today. I doubt it would have been at the time in question. Technology was very primitive then, in comparison to what we have now.

> Also, to be credible, you're assuming the US is telling other's about their system (so that the USSR knows/will think that it can't simply take out the president and there won't be retaliation). Otherwise it's all just based on speculation and in terms of deterrent doesn't matter what the actual system is.

The assumption is that the enemy has some insight into your system. In which case it really does matter what your system is.

> Why must it be external, though. Both you and I are concerned about how the government should operate in a manner that protects the populace; I'm just saying that from the populace's POV, the government is/can be an external threat. Look at Kiev right now.

Again, you're arguing about a different issue than the one I am. I agree that a government can become an enemy of its public. But while that's a plausible scenario, it's not the one I was analyzing. Thus my comment that you're shifting the meaning of the vocabulary to refer to a different concept.

Perhaps instead of downvotes, friends, having a discussion about our differences in philosophy would be more useful to us and any potential readers.