Department of Secrecy

Every government has secrets from other governments. It is always problematic for any government to decide who should be allowed to know what, within its own borders, lest outsiders gain that knowledge also, and thereby let enemies use it in a detrimental way. It is even more problematic for democracies, where the free flow of information is an inherently important aspect to maintaining the democracy. Whoever first said words to the effect that secrecy is the mother of tyranny -- that person spelled out the dilemma quite plainly.

Nevertheless, as long as there are competitors in the world, there will be secrets. They must be managed like other forms of information -- just more carefully. And, there are special considerations that must be taken into account in that management. For a government (maybe even other organizations, like corporations), it may be that a straightforward Department Of Secrecy might be the proper venue for such information management. Such a Department means that all the secrets can be somewhere under its roof. In organization, it might be something like the classic "cell system" of various underground groups (best description I know of cell system: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein). The cell system strongly resists an across-the-board loss of secrets, but allows the Department Heads to have a chance of knowing what both the left hand and the right hand are doing! If nothing else, knowing that alone can prevent wasteful duplication of secret efforts. But it also gives the Department Heads the chance to connect ideas from different secret operations, and I suspect that this is something that is sadly lacking in current organizations.

For a democracy, the biggest problem with such an organization was first spelled out by the ancient Romans: "Who will watch the watchers?" The best answer I know is that there must be more than one group of watchers, who watch each other in addition to the other stuff that they need to keep track of. History has shown that three such groups represent a stable social structure. For example, inside the former U.S.S.R., the triad of watchfulness was the Party, the Army, and the KGB. In the United States, the triad consists of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. In the Cold War, the triad was the USSR versus the US versus China. The USSR went bankrupt, but the European Union seems to be taking its place nicely....

For a Department of Secrecy, then, let me try to describe a unique cell system needed to accomplish a triad of watchfullness. The Chief Executive of the nation (or corporation) receives separate reports from the equal-level top three people in the Department. None of THEM can easily try to take away the Executive's job, because each has two competitors. Let me call them ARed, ABlue, and AGreen. There are three B-level cells, EACH of which contains people we can call BRed, BBlue, and BGreen. Each BRed reports only to ARed, each BBlue reports only to ABlue, and each BGreen reports only to AGreen. However, to accomplish the work of the cell, BRed, BBlue, and BGreen must work together. The cell may include more people, if that is needed to get the cell's job done, but only BRed, BBlue, and BGreen are in the communications ladder of the cell system. WITHIN a cell, everyone is supposed to know all about the job of the cell, and communications must occur freely among all people in the cell. The only secret of the cell should be the Red/Green/Blue identities. That is, everyone in the cell should know which three people are in the communications ladder (so they can be watched!), but nobody should know who they report to. (Well, except that BBlue will know about reporting to ABlue, of course.)

One of the checks-and-balances of this system relates to the passing of orders. ARed, ABlue, and AGreen make plans, and any of them can pass resulting commands along to any of the B-Level cells. So, if AGreen tells a B-cell to do something about which BRed is suspicious, BRed can report that to ARed, who can take any descrepancy in the cell A's planned commands to the next level, in this case the Executive, for resolution (AGreen might be fired). Even if not suspicious, BRed and BBlue will probably need to report what AGreen told their cell to do.

In describing Level C of this cell system, and it's relationship to B, this is exactly analogous to B's relationship with A. Any difficulty-of-understanding here relates to the fact that there are three B-Level cells, and nine C-Level cells. However, the three B cells are supposed to be independent of each other, and keep their secrets to themselves (and to the A cell, of course). Thus, each B cell is in charge of only three C cells, just like the A cell is in charge of the three B cells. And each C cell will be in charge of three D cells, and so on.

It is kind of neat that document and security-level classifications can be nicely correlated to A-Level, B-Level, and so on. However, I suspect that current "Top" secret stuff will likely be farther down the levels than one might first think, simply because there are lots of things that are declared Top Secret -- and the quantities of people to be involved with all those things can only be found in the lower levels of this organization. Nevertheless, a Department of Secrecy will not want to have too many layers, because it increases the chance of leaked secrets. One way through that conundrum may be that in order to accomplish many large secret projects, there perhaps should be more cells on a level than the described multiples-of-three. Such decisions will be up to those who actually run a Department of Secrets (and it need not change at all the described triad of watchfulness and communications, should each cell be in charge of four or five, instead of three).