I am so sick and tired of the media and their "earth shattering" news stories about how this nation has secret this and secret that. Those secrets are called classified information and millions of cleared citizens have access to those secrets everyday. Those secrets are what is keeping this country safe and what are keeping the bad guys out. I personally don't WANT to know what our government is doing behind those SCIF walls. There are some things we're better off not knowing. Can you imagine if we tried to orchestrate D-Day in this day and age? The plot would be leaked to the media so fast that our soldiers would be killed before they were even halfway there.
In my job, it is my responsibility to make sure that this country remains safe. I brief hundreds of people a year about what could happen to them if they divulged classified information. What a slap in the face to the security community for one Geraldo or Katie Couric to blast all over the news the whereabouts of our secret bases or the intricacies of our spying missions. I could be thrown in jail for divulging such things and even given the death penalty. What do they get? An Emmy.
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WORD!
AMEN!
Agreed...but not whole-heartedly. The Need To Know is absolute necessity but at the same time, for lack of a better word, convenient.
Given the complexity of modern warfare systems, a program has the capability of having 1000 different subsystems and 1000's of sub-subsystems. Each subsystem can be developed by a seperate contractor, and thusly that contractor would know absolutely nothing else about the project. This is good in 99.9999% of the time. But let me give you an example of the other .0001% of the time.
Say for example, you are a assistant program director for Project X. You are commissioned with a clothing and blanket Flash Cleaning system that is compact and deployable in the field. You contract a team to design a pressure box for the cleanables and another team to develop a steam propietary pressure system that can inject a high pressure soap-carrying-steam into an ambiguous volume that has quick release soap cartridges. You join the two systems.
Your system is deployed and a few months later and people are now dying in the warzone from smallpox. Turns out, your other Assistant Program Director was developing a hyperabsorbing blanket, and another Assistant PD was developing a smallpox strain that could survive packaging and steam delivery. You shouldn't have access to this information because you don't Need To Know there part of the project. The only person who had the Need To Know for everything was your Program Director. You never find out about your other assistants and you live your life in blissful ignorance, happy you got your program together.
This example would never happen, but it demonstrates the convenience factor of the need to know. Our country is not sinless because it is run by human beings. But thankfully there are numbers to call within the the system if you do find out about unethical programs. Leaks are unacceptable. But if someone were in a situation like in the above and may be didn't believe their report on unethical behavior to the proper authorities would be taken seriously or never saw the report acted upon, they could very well think they have no place to turn other than the media.
Geraldo should be in jail, not still reporting for Fox News. Altho if I recall correctly, he was forced out of his reporter duties and sent back as a talking head. I'm pretty sure he didn't win an emmy over that. Every single media representative knows not to divulge troop movements. What happened with Couric?
You raise a good point, but the security world actually does have a system put in place to enable information like that to be shared. It's called a non-contractual visit. The only problem is, you have to get approval from the government agency that owns the information before you can divulge it -- so you are right -- if the PM doesnt raise the flag to call the meeting, something could slip through the cracks. Nothing is perfect -- especially in the security world, but it sure does make our jobs harder when things leak from the media.
Couric was more of a metaphor than a concrete example. The NSA wire tapping, the CIA secret camps... all of those were reported by the mainstream media and Couric is a prime figurehead of that nowadays.
Personally, as a member of an open and democratic society, I want to know as much as I safely can about everything the government is doing. I want the privledge -- no, repsonsibility -- to bust balls if someone starts some secret torturing prisons or clandestine wiretapping program.
I fully understand the need for some secret operations, but secrecy creates a haven for unethical behaviour and I just don't have enough faith in the leaders to let them have unchecked, free reign.
The system of compartmentalizing helps to keep more than an essential amount of information out of the hands of the design-and-build folks. In today's world the contractors' contractors who do the actual work. That's a pretty nice system and seems to work pretty well ... if not a little heavy, but that's a price to pay.
On the other hand, at the level where this information comes together and again at the level where the direction is set and programs are started are people who I want watched very, very closely. I want to know if they are behaving strangely or if they have some agenda that I may find horrific. Because they work for me, I have a right to know. I may not want to know the details of how or what, but I need to know why and the results. All of them.
For that, I rely on the media. I know, that's not very close to perfect but it is what I've got. The media today aren't doing a very good job either by busting open programs that make a good story but aren't really problematic or not exposing some really dark methods or motivations that are in play. And today it seems that the market is doing a bad job of punishing the media for doing a bad job of monitoring the government.
We will not have a better government without a better media.
*sigh*
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