The Secret About Secrets.
Written by author Douglas Castle (http://aboutdouglascastle.blogspot.com/) for original publication in TAKING COMMAND! (http://takingcommand.blogspot.com/).
The sad truth of the matter is this: Anyone (even the people closest to you, with time-tested allegiance, loyalty and steadfastness) will reveal any secret which they have been entrusted with.
It's merely a matter of how much stress (psychological or physical torture, or the threat of the same) is applied to them or how well they are compensated for revealing the "secret" information.
Stress is generally much more effective than avarice as a motivator for surrendering information. Have you seen those movies about the CIA and other mysterious and lawless organizations interrogating or intimidating folks to get answers? Remember the media sensation caused by the very notion that the United States was shipping detainees, usually suspected terrorists, to secret locations and having them tortured? Waterboarding, anyone?
As they say during rudimentary training at one of these non-existent agencies, "the first rule is to never, ever get caught..."
These horrifying techniques will generally produce any secret (if it is known to the victim), or even incite the creation of a secret (even if it is totally invented by the victim), just to stop the pressure or the pain. And psychological torture works every bit as well as physical torture if the perceived threat level is sufficient.
If psychological torture is combined with a vigorous financial incentive, the results and revelations generally come more quickly. And once the first taboo is broken, i.e., the first secret is told, defenses crumble rapidly and the floodgates open.
What, then do you do with your secrets? There are several possibilities:
1. Never reduce them to writing or tell them to a soul. No one can actually reveal your secrets if you haven't told them any;
2. Split secrets up into seemingly meaningless tidbits of information and reveal a different tidbit to each individual in a large group. Each tidbit, of itself, is meaningless, but the collection of information nuggets given to the whole group of individuals can be brought together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. All of the parties would have to be "gotten to" in order to put the whole puzzle together. This makes getting meaningful information much more difficult for the seeker;
3. Create a complex series of steps or procedures requiring the isolated actions of several persons, (preferably unbeknownst to eachother), in a certain specially-ordered sequence in order to get at the secret. This added complexity, with each step and each individual, makes the task of prying information from those whom you've entrusted more difficult for the seeker as well.
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Remember the ancient, romantic notion of the legendary Swiss Bankers keeping your information secret? A banker, in virtually any former private or tax-haven jurisdiction will tell all that he or she knows if the right person merely flashes a badge. The problem is solved by constructing your affairs such that no one individual at any institution or agency knows your identity.
It is not easy to protect your privacy or secrets -- it is becoming increasingly complicated in a data-mining, data-base-sharing, computer-linked world. Anonymity is exceedingly difficult to achieve. And sadly, secrets have to be structured in such a fashion that: 1) no one person knows too much information; 2) no group of several persons who know each other can put their bits of your secret together; and 3) that elaborate steps must be precisely followed. Perhaps one of the greatest safeguards is to be absolutely certain that nobody knows that you are the beneficiary, or the master planner.
An acquaintance of mine once told me, "we are all puppets, and nobody knows who is actually pulling our strings..."
This last point seems worth committing to memory.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
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