Keeping Silent

Via Politburo Diktat, Ace of Spades has a good explanation for the terminally outraged on how the government is sometimes not lying to you, it's lying for you.



But I do think one of his examples was weak. Not the Chinese Embassy stuff, that's spot on. But anybody with any intelligence or exposure to banking records requirements knew the government tracks financial records extensively. It's how we catch mobsters, drug traffickers, etcetera, and how we have been catching them since the 1930s. The government doesn't publicize it, but if they ever said, "We're not doing it," I must have missed it. They simply didn't draw any attention to it. Just like there are ways people in certain high-risk occupations have of letting people know that There Is A Situation But I Can't Say So Openly. Many of these are found in publicly available, completely unclassified documentation, others are things that everybody in the business knows. However, you don't see them splashed on the front of the trade publications. To coin a completely bogus but plausible example of the sort that are used, "If your auto dealership is taken over by terrorists, fly double pennons! The Police know that's what it means!" If the New York Times or other media publicized these methods, those these methods are meant to guard against would be able to take precautions, and sometimes there just aren't a whole lot of means available. If the network news said, "A Police SWAT Team was able to deal with Al-Qaeda taking over the grounds of Joe's Discount Car Sales in Podunk today. Forty-three terrorists were killed without civilian injury. They discovered it unbeknownst to the terrorists when an alert Police Officer, Mr. B. Anonymous, noticed that the employees at Joe's were flying double pennons, a universal signal that car dealerships are being controlled by terrorists." Add that to the standard camera shots, and every terrorist from now on is going to know that double pennons mean the SWAT team is going to come, and there are only a limited number of such signals possible.



It's not that the government said that bank records weren't being monitored. That would have been a stupid, obvious lie. Of course bank records were being monitored. They've been monitored for seventy years. But sometimes, if you just don't bring something to your enemies' attention, they forget about it. Or maybe nobody ever told them in particular. Or they just don't realize that this is important information, they don't worry about it, and pretty soon, their arrests are announced. Kind of like a combat ambush but better.



Publicizing these methods means that they are not available or won't work. The enemies of civilization will take precautions so that they don't get caught by them. And that is precisely the crime of the media in the banking records brouhaha. They reminded those whom the methods were being used against them that these methods existed, so they could take precautions against them. I think the War on Drugs is a stupid worthless counterproductive waste of resources, but given that I can't change the fact that we are fighting it, finding drug traffickers through financial records sure beats no-knock raids. I'd rather not be fighting the War On Terror, either. But given that we are in it whether we want it or not, I'd rather discover terrorist plots through their financing before the fact than during, when they and the enforcement types are spraying bullets everywhere and bystanders are likely to get hurt, or afterwards, when all we can do is pick up the debris.