Does Secret Intelligence Exist?

      Does Secret Intelligence Exist?

 

           I deny the very concept of “secret intelligence”. Secrecy and intelligence are mutually exclusive. The more secret, the less intelligent; the more intelligent, the less secret.

 Sure, there is secret information; but information is not intelligence. To call information ‘intelligence’ is presumption; you can do very stupid things with lots of data. Also, secret information is at best suspect. How to trust those secret sources and methods? To be reliable, information must endure the slings and arrows of outrageous public criticism. The alternative is cultism.

Secret intelligence is like a private language. Once Calvin, in “Calvin and Hobbes”, had an exam question; explain Newton’s First Law “in your own words”. He answered with gibberish.

          Secret intelligence is also like papal infallibility; an error-accumulation technique. Error-correction, by contrast, is scientific and democratic.

          I say that intelligence, by nature, is open. Sure as rivers flow to the sea, intelligence tends to become the common property of all humankind.