> 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.
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?