Everybody loves a secret. We love to keep them, we love to learn them, and we love telling other people about them, especially if we promised not to. Politics is all about secrets. Every profession like law and medicine and Guild of Magicians, is a conspiracy of secrets. If non-professionals know how the tricks are done, there goes the profit margin.
Those whose job it is to discover secrets are called spies. Governments spy on their citizens, and are spied on in return, so spying is a profession as old and as universal as government itself. Two thousand years ago ancient Rome was full of spies (called “informers”) employed by emperors, powerful senators and priests to keep a secret eye on the population and sniff out any hint of treachery or unorthodoxy. They were kept busy, but they had limited techniques at their disposal: listening at doors, bribing informers, and simply watching the people they suspected. Everybody hated them. Every totalitarian regime depends on spies for its survival, and China seems now to be reproducing this Orwellian world of total surveillance, with its neighborhood committees and universal security cameras.
But it works both ways. Governments have secrets,, too. Indeed they are passionately attached to them because they know that the plain truth about anything would be a public relations disaster. Governments love their security clearances, their classified files, and, of course, their spies. Hollywood has transformed the spy into a positively romantic figure, from James Bond to George Smiley. They belong to the glamorous world, a world of national secrets where the fate of whole nations may hang in the balance over a missing formula, an intercepted message, or a kidnapped leader.
It is a shame, in a way, that this whole Baroque structure of secrecy and lies has begun to fall apart. Now that we all share the wonderful Internet, just about any information, no matter how officially secret, is available to anyone who knows how to search for it and who wants to share it. The betrayers of government secrets become real-life celebrities: Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowdon, Aldrich Ames. But they are often mundane and even rather sad figures, with not a weaponized Aston Martin or a golden gun between them.
Governments and corporations have things they want to hide of course — policy secrets, defense secrets, scientific secrets — although these are usually less important than their guardians like to imagine. But they absolutely cannot resist posting their secrets on the web, where they can be harvested by highly skilled teams of hackers anywhere in the world. Scarcely a week goes by without another espionage scandal, but not of the James Bond kind. More likely, some disgruntled or ideologically motivated person — a diplomat, a military officer, or even an FBI or CIA Agent — someone who gains access to official computers, downloads classified information onto a memory stick, and posts it on the web. No heroics, no cunning disguises, no car chases, and no international travels are necessary.
Government officials get ridiculously upset when their secrets are revealed. “You promised you wouldn’t tell,” they cry, like five-year-olds. But, of course, somebody will tell eventually, because we’re all connected. In the age of the Internet there really are no more secrets.
