The recent revelations that an October ricin incident was downplayed and another incident aimed at the White House was kept secret illustrate the relevance of the following passage from Weapons of Mass Deception (2003) by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:
When it comes to security, in fact, secrecy has a way of backfiring - a point that was noted, ironically enough in a secret 1977 CIA study that was not declassified until October 2002. "We know that secrecy by its very nature may affect the personality of its practitioners," wrote its author (whose identity still remains a secret). He noted that these "unintended psychological effects ... seem to diminish rather than enhance security." As an example, he pointed to the attack on Pearl Harbor: "That most disastrous of intelligence failures was due in no small measure to the mishandling of compartmentalized inteligence. The dissemination of decrypted Japanese communications ... was so restricted that the theater commanders in Hawaii did not regularly receive them." [The document can be found online here.]
The failures of U.S. intelligence information-sharing prior to September 11 provides another possible example of the same phenomenon. Following the attck members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees held joint hearings to examine why the FBI and other investigators were unable to detect the terrorist plot before it took place. The investigation revealed that intelligence agencies had many more warnings of possible terrorist attacks than had been previously disclosed to the public. (Paragraph continued in Part 2.)
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