The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

Well, this sure puts a different spin on the arrogance of the US Government. The new Aristocracy, those with "clearances", receive and can act on information that the rest of us can't be allowed to have. The Fed's "We just know better than you" attitude probably derives directly from this secret pool of knowledge.

But why would you divide up information into 15 or 20 categories? I bet that even at "Top Secret" levels, the narrowness of view is stultifying.

for those interested in US governmental secrecy stuff, http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ is a very interesting blog/newsletter

There are a lot of things required to make a modern spy satellite that I know nothing about. Saying there is a special clearance related to that information is limiting but so is lacking the engineering knowledge to understand it even if someone where to tell it to me. Ditto, sonar, atomic bombs, jet engines, tank armor etc. But, I also lack the historic understanding of the middle east politics to understand a transcript of high level diplomatic talks. Toss in the classic military issue of troop movements etc which are just as meaningless to me but still dangerous. And you are left with a huge pile of information would be valuable to a wide range of institutions AND totally useless to most people out there.

So, while there are implications of need to know they are IMO less significant than capable of understanding.

If anyone has seen the comedy series "Yes, Prime Minister", they'll often understand how a leader can be manipulated by his mandarins through selective disclosure of uncorroborated information, present consequences couched in politically unacceptable terms, force the hand by setting the agenda.

This is especially true if dissenting opinion is filtered before it gets handed to the President etc.

I apologize if the following sounds a little leftist. I only intend to make a point about how mistakes come to be made, and what governments may need to do to arrive at better decisions:

Over in Australia, an ASIO analyst chose to resign rather than see Australia join the Iraq war on the basis of WMD pretexts. (Andrew Wilke is now a Member of Parliament).

The trillion dollar mistake US made was due to influencers being able to feed super-classified information to the willingly gullible people.

It is not easy for a President to call bullshit. I believe the reason is because there isn't sufficient accountability that is built into the system. In days past, members of the royalty are expected to fight in wars. Even during Roman days, only landowners could join the army. The appearance of the professional soldiers lowered the personal risk of the people in power who rush into war.

The Chinese emperors surrounded themselves with eunuchs thinking that the absence of offspring give some assurance that these people will be less biased, but it didn't work out that well. Influence is still peddled, particularly because power itself is very addictive on its own.

Some cultures resort to shamans to try to get an outcome that is independent of any one person's viewpoint. The most interesting one that I came across is the use of ibogaine, where people have a "spiritual" moment, where they see the big picture instead of worrying about themselves.

For a complex society to survive and transcend humanity's limitations, we may need to create a supermind. Some elements of this already exist. One is the idea of "opensource intelligence" that can be used to corroborate otherwise secret accounts.

> why would you divide up information into 15 or 20 categories?

To protect the information it in case one invididual gets compromised.

> I bet that even at "Top Secret" levels, the narrowness of view is stultifying.

Yes and that often makes work seem pointless and unrewarding. Invididuals migth get to view a very thin slice of a large project. So they might be designing an algorithm or a widget without knowing how and where it fits in the big picture.

I am guessing for some projects this compartmentalization leads to the dilution of guilt. "Hey I only build detonators", "I only build the shell", "I build the remote control", "I only leave the device in a certain place without know what it is". But all these people could be making something that would hurt or kill someone.