>And if that’s the case… what’s the point of all of this secrecy, then? Because any one thing isn't enough to reconstruct the full picture, but many pieces com

>And if that’s the case… what’s the point of all of this secrecy, then? Because any one thing isn't enough to reconstruct the full picture, but many pieces combined can provide the bigger picture. And the problem is way more complex than "let's use a series of blurry pictures to reverse engineer a nuke"--there are more goals than this, like for instance figuring out the U.S. nuke arsenal capabilities, seeing if an adversary has figured out a technology we possess, etc etc Come on now, this is basic OPSEC. edit: Like for instance, look at the Snowden leaks. There were some stuff in the Snowden leaks that had very little to do with US public interest, but were accidentally leaked by stupid journos who don't know how to use a computer. And this did lead to actionable intelligence from our adversaries.