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Comment by gordian-not | Hacker News Reader

So, just from the top of my head and rather recently:

1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians

2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog

3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design

4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki

5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month

Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place

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The key to all of those is they are digital files easily copied and deseminated online. It hard to hack a mechanical typewriter and or to exfiltrate physical documents locked in a filing cabinet in a secure facility. Then distributing them en mass the way the way digital channels like discord can is just not managable unless your a major news paper publisher. Digital information wants to be free, typewriten documents want to be locked in a documents warehouse missfiled and lost forever.

That’s the key to the fact they were disseminated online. They still hired people that weren’t fit to keep these secrets and that’s not a new issue

Don't forget the OPM hack (2015)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

Organizations keep secrets all the time. A huge amount of American history is learned after the fact when documents are declassified.

So despite countless of soviet spies in the FBI and CIA, the end of the cold war, defectors and open archives

The JFK assassination still remained a secret?

I think there are some secrets that don’t go on file. Often times the most crucial meetings involve subtle cues over a cup of tea.

Thousands of documents related to it still remain classified, even after a declaration to declassify them. So... Yes.

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