When "Protecting National Security" Harms National Security

Because national security is whatever I say it is

The UAP classification guidelines are … classified.

Our governments lie all the time, about everything. I would bet that the only truths they tell are inconsequential ones, and even then, they still lie about the small stuff, even when they have nothing significant to hide. By this time it’s completely habitual. The following is an audiovisual synecdoche of our situation:

Similarly, the astronauts currently enjoying an extended stay within the International Space Station are not now, nor have they ever been, “stranded.” The Boeing Starliner capsule is simply “troubled.”

It wasn’t always this bad. I personally think the main reason it has become so was probably the adoption of psychopathic psychological warfare tactics in the years after World War II. And what started in the intelligence community has branched out into every facet of modern political and corporate life.

In my article on worldview warfare I made the following point: when your institution adopts the psychological methods of psychopathy, you open it to institutional capture by actual psychopaths. And they’re better at using those methods than you are.

Press conferences these days are simply exercises in reading prepared talking points designed to evade giving actual answers and to present the most palatable representation of reality possible. It’s transparently disingenuous—fake. And it seems like 99% of our leaders do this, which is probably why they’re all so unpopular. Even if we can’t always explain why, regular people pick up on this fakeness.

In my article on UAP disclosure I made another point: “swamp-gassing” the public keeps them within an artificially truncated worldview—a manufactured Overton window. It just so happens that swamp-gassing (or gaslighting) is one of the above-mentioned psychopathic manipulation tactics.

Here’s another point I’ve made repeatedly. Lobaczewski constantly refers to the perils of the “common psychological worldview.” Without objective psychological knowledge, you will not be able to navigate interactions that involve psychopathology effectively because it is so far outside of most people’s ordinary frame of reference. Phrased more generally, you can’t accurately navigate reality when your map is fundamentally flawed or missing key features—like islands, coastlines, or entire continents. You are dooming yourself to failure.

Whether it is UAP or politics in general, the magic words “national security” often enter the conversation. UAP data is almost entirely classified at a very high level for “national security” reasons. Video footage taken with various advanced sensors, for instance, remains classified because declassifying them can reveal key capabilities of those sensors to political adversaries. That’s the fake PR reason, at least. Similar footage from those same platforms is routinely and immediately made public when they get harassed by Russian jet fighters, for instance. Key details relating to events of national or international importance are also so classified, like the photographs of Bin Laden’s dead body.¹

I’ve read that many documents are classified simply in order to get people to read them. It’s part of a trend. Government employees feel that unclassified information isn’t as important and so might not take the time to read it. “Top secret” implies important and worth reading. Needless to say, that is not the purpose of classification.

Too much information is currently classified, and too much of that information is classified too highly. When scientific information is classified on a need-to-know basis, to the extent that you’re not allowed to talk about your work with the scientist in the cubicle next to yours, you’re not going to get very far. Science requires the free sharing of information in order to advance. So at least in this example you run up against a seemingly insoluble problem. Free sharing = no security. No sharing = bad science.² If such advances happen to be “necessary to national security,” it’s a case of national security shooting itself in the foot.

The definition of national security, however, is not strictly defined, as far as I can tell. Perhaps it is a bit like pornography—“you know it when you see it.” But its vagueness makes it rife for abuse.

All aspects of national security (military, economic, infrastructure, cyber, environmental, technological, nuclear, etc.) may come into conflict with each other, for instance when military spending weakens other parts of the economy, or military action undermines political stability or international relations, or new technologies threaten cornerstones of the national economy. Since national security is a multifactorial problem—with each factor potentially in conflict with the others—it is impossible to come up with a set of hard and fast rules for what is and isn’t in its interests. At any given moment one factor may trump others in terms of importance, so every national security issue, even if universally agreed upon as important, is inherently relative and subject to the value judgments of those with the final say and to changing geopolitical contexts.

Naturally the easiest way out of this mess is to ignore it and simply classify as much as possible—which is the current practice. Even parts of the classification guidelines are classified.

“Classify it all and let God sort it out.”

Officially, the U.S. government is not supposed to classify things because of the embarrassment that public disclosure might produce. But is it really reasonable to expect them not to do so? There are “embarrassments” so big that they would surely endanger national security. Maybe you are spying on your allies and using that intelligence to gain an advantage in negotiating contracts or for the purposes of blackmail. Maybe JFK really was murdered by the CIA. Maybe this also extends to avoiding the embarrassment of allies, when not doing so could threaten key strategic and economic relationships. Let’s say we know that country X, our political ally, performed “embarrassing” act A, perhaps against our own citizens, and we know they did it. Disclose or cover up?

Taken even further, maybe there are limits to what we will even expose about our “enemies.” Perhaps act B performed by enemy Y was so outrageous that exposing it would be perceived by them as a serious breach of their own national security, perhaps threatening a nuclear confrontation or the potential that they would expose us for our involvement in act C, which we keep secret for similar reasons.

Looked at in this way, every major SNAFU or criminal enterprise in the national security state, even if performed by those ever-present “bad apples,” as well as those of all other nations, is a national security concern. At the extreme it becomes a global game of blackmail. (<cough> Epstein! </cough>)

In this framework, even relatively small disclosures can have the ability to threaten national security if they threaten to open the door to more questions and deeper disclosures. And when practically everything related threatens the national security, even if only potentially, it becomes imperative to lie about practically everything even only tangentially related. And when you’re already lying so much already, it’s not a far stretch simply to lie about everything else.

But here’s the rub. By conceiving of the national security in this way, you end up engaging in behaviors that arguably also threaten the national security. For one, you make people distrust or even hate you. They see you hiding information from them and lying to them and they become distrustful and resentful. Is a massive loss of public trust a national security concern? If so, it may necessitate even more PR “reframing” doublespeak and psychological “nudging” in order to elicit the appropriate response.

Such nudging is ubiquitous now. Here’s Dr. Gary Sidley:

1. State-sponsored nudging is ubiquitous in the U.K., seeping into almost every aspect of day-to-day life. Whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by state-funded technocrats.

2. The rapid expansion of U.K. behavioural science has not occurred by chance; it has been a strategic goal. For example, a 2018 document by Public Health England (the forerunner to the U.K. Health Security Agency) announced that “The behavioural and social sciences are the future of public health”, and one of its priority goals was to make the skills of these disciplines “mainstream in all our organisations”.

3. Throughout Covid, U.K. Government communications – as guided by its behavioural science advisers – routinely resorted to fear inflation, shaming and scapegoating (‘affect,’ ‘ego,’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges) to lever compliance with restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.

4. The U.K. Government’s bar for legitimising the terrorising of its own people has been set incredibly low. For instance, one official justification for inflicting further fear inflation onto an already scared population was that, in January 2021, the populace was not as frightened as at the start of Covid in March 2020: “Fearful but much less panic this time around.”

All of this just creates a vicious circle feeding back on itself. Official secrecy, over-classification, a climate of casual and routine lying, psychological “nudge” warfare, “embarrassments” and crimes. All of these feed each other. The more you cover up, the more you have to cover up the cover-up. The longer you do this, the bigger the potential fallout. It’s hubris to think this can be maintained.

This kind of climate of secrecy, lies, and impression management facilitates the rise of liars and otherwise incompetent yes-men. A wolf in sheep’s clothing is bad enough, but what if everyone is wearing wolf’s clothing, and many of them don’t even realize it?

1. The government’s argument was that releasing the “gruesome” images would “incite violence, … aid al-Qaeda in recruitment, and … lead to attack[s] on U.S. military, U.S. citizens, and attacks against our allies.”

2. This is reportedly the problem in UAP reverse-engineering SAPs.