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At the risk of asking an unanswerable question, what kind of "legitimately secret projects" do you think must remain funded by a covert budget?
by dublinben 12y ago
At the risk of asking an unanswerable question, what kind of "legitimately secret projects" do you think must remain funded by a covert budget?
- YokoZar 12y agoXCOM
- logfromblammo 12y agoThe kind that are completely incompatible with an open, democratic society, obviously. The fundamental problem is that any secrecy sufficient to hide weakness from an adversary can also hide corruption from the beneficiary. We literally cannot tell the difference between the cost of running a legitimate defense operation and the cost of all the director's cronies buying beach cocktails all morning, country club fees all afternoon, and hookers and blow all night. If you look hard enough at just the publicly reported budget items, you can see worse! Corruption does not become less prevalent under a thicker layer of obfuscation! And, obviously, if you write down on your budget that you need tax money to intentionally give Southern black men syphilis and then leave it untreated just so that you can see what happens to them, some people might have a problem with that. But then again, you might ask for tax money to kidnap and imprison people with Japanese ancestry until the war with Japan ends, and people would be too busy to notice it. If giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys, adding secrecy is like putting a teenaged girl in the mix. Any rational parent would, quite sensibly, attempt to ensure that the boy only had access to, at most, one of those three things at any given time, because any two in combination inevitably results in utter disaster.
- gaadd33 12y agoWhat about things like the U2, SR-71 and similar planes that gave us a huge advantage? How about the Manhattan Project?