Post by auntym on Sept 1, 2014 12:21:19 GMT -6
ufodigest.com/article/psst-0901
PSST, CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?
By Nick Pope
September 01, 2014
Belief in a government (or quasi-governmental) cover-up is central to the belief system of many people in the UFO community, and in relation to this issue one frequently comes across discussions about the extent to which it’s possible to keep secrets. Having worked for 21 years in an inherently secretive part of the UK government, I thought I’d correct a few popular misconceptions about government secrecy and make some other relevant points on the issue. My knowledge and experience here comes not specifically from my three years on the MoD’s UFO project, but is something gained in the course of my wider 21-year career, which encompassed various postings at a number of different grades. My final posting – to the Directorate of Defence Security – is probably the most relevant one.
First of all, let’s dispel a myth that I hear quite a lot. Many people will tell you that secrets can’t be kept in the modern era. While acknowledging that various historic secrets were successfully kept (e.g. the Manhattan Project and the breaking of the Enigma Code during the Second World War), skeptics often claim that such secrecy would be impossible nowadays, and say that if there were explosive government secrets on UFOs, they would have leaked out by now. The absence of any significant UFO-related material on WikiLeaks is often cited as proof of this. Frankly, this is nonsense. Just because some highly-classified material has been leaked, it doesn’t mean that the walls of the secret state have come tumbling down. Despite the vast amount of material on WikiLeaks, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a significant proportion of leaked material and compromised secrets comes from just two individuals: Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. The vast majority of people handling classified information keep the secrets with which they’ve been entrusted. On a related point, while the media and the public focus on leaked documents and spilled secrets, they have no visibility of the vast amount of classified material that remains secret.
So how does the government keep secrets in this era of 24/7 media coverage, hacking, targeted espionage, social networking, WikiLeaks and all the other ways in which classified information can be compromised? The answer is Information Security, often abbreviated to InfoSec. I’m not going to go into too many details here, for obvious reasons, but for people who are interested there’s a vast amount of unclassified information about InfoSec in the public domain, covering various ways in which secrets are kept, including vetting, the ‘need to know’ principle, cryptography and a wide range of other measures. A particular buzz phrase at present is the “insider threat” and self-evidently it’s harder to protect information (and other assets) from within than from without. This is one reason why the full weight of the Establishment comes down so hard on the likes of Manning and Snowden, on the basis that the prospect of a long prison sentence is a powerful deterrent to those considering leaking classified information.
CONTINUE READING: ufodigest.com/article/psst-0901
PSST, CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?
By Nick Pope
September 01, 2014
Belief in a government (or quasi-governmental) cover-up is central to the belief system of many people in the UFO community, and in relation to this issue one frequently comes across discussions about the extent to which it’s possible to keep secrets. Having worked for 21 years in an inherently secretive part of the UK government, I thought I’d correct a few popular misconceptions about government secrecy and make some other relevant points on the issue. My knowledge and experience here comes not specifically from my three years on the MoD’s UFO project, but is something gained in the course of my wider 21-year career, which encompassed various postings at a number of different grades. My final posting – to the Directorate of Defence Security – is probably the most relevant one.
First of all, let’s dispel a myth that I hear quite a lot. Many people will tell you that secrets can’t be kept in the modern era. While acknowledging that various historic secrets were successfully kept (e.g. the Manhattan Project and the breaking of the Enigma Code during the Second World War), skeptics often claim that such secrecy would be impossible nowadays, and say that if there were explosive government secrets on UFOs, they would have leaked out by now. The absence of any significant UFO-related material on WikiLeaks is often cited as proof of this. Frankly, this is nonsense. Just because some highly-classified material has been leaked, it doesn’t mean that the walls of the secret state have come tumbling down. Despite the vast amount of material on WikiLeaks, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a significant proportion of leaked material and compromised secrets comes from just two individuals: Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. The vast majority of people handling classified information keep the secrets with which they’ve been entrusted. On a related point, while the media and the public focus on leaked documents and spilled secrets, they have no visibility of the vast amount of classified material that remains secret.
So how does the government keep secrets in this era of 24/7 media coverage, hacking, targeted espionage, social networking, WikiLeaks and all the other ways in which classified information can be compromised? The answer is Information Security, often abbreviated to InfoSec. I’m not going to go into too many details here, for obvious reasons, but for people who are interested there’s a vast amount of unclassified information about InfoSec in the public domain, covering various ways in which secrets are kept, including vetting, the ‘need to know’ principle, cryptography and a wide range of other measures. A particular buzz phrase at present is the “insider threat” and self-evidently it’s harder to protect information (and other assets) from within than from without. This is one reason why the full weight of the Establishment comes down so hard on the likes of Manning and Snowden, on the basis that the prospect of a long prison sentence is a powerful deterrent to those considering leaking classified information.
CONTINUE READING: ufodigest.com/article/psst-0901