Information security

Guarding the Guards at the CIA

Human intelligence is a game of deception. The acquisition of government sources depends on duplicity, and the intelligence agency must lie to protect the source. It is an industry in which secrecy and dishonesty are moral imperatives. Take World War II, for example. The United States and Britain won World War II in large part because they had broken the German and Japanese codes. They knew what their enemies were planning and could counter it. In order for the breach to work, it had to be kept secret from the public. The secrets of the breach were revealed years after the war, but had the Germans and the Japanese caught wind of it sooner, they would have changed their codes, and the outcome of the war might’ve been different.