Recycling Is A Good Thing

But be careful, if secrets are to be protected from exposure to the wrong hands, while recycling is a must, it must be undertaken with extreme care and planning and with malice aforethought.

Everything else that is not reusable should be recycled in the most expeditious manner available. After all, if you have nothing to hide, there may be no value to privacy. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

If secrecy is paramount however, then some things should not be reused at all, ever, and should be immediately converted to smaller media if data needs to be retained, before non expeditious recycling.

For instance, the then current but now old fashioned audio recording tapes used secretly for years in the Nixon White house probably should not have been recorded over (let alone stored with others) because technology might even then have been available to decipher the original message. And we all know what hearing the tape meant, history was made and a crook was called to account, not what the most powerful person in the world wanted.

Yes, the moral is, Nixon should have carefully recycled. It would have maintained some of his virtue, now completely lost to the average American.

His record during his Presidency would be vastly different if he had transcribed his tapes daily onto compostable paper then immediately to small microfilm  and kept the small media in his bedroom underwear drawer only to be discovered after his death instead of during his presidency.

Of course the compostable paper should then have been shredded and randomly distributed to multiple worm bins and hot compost piles in at least 10 different states. The CIA might have operated that many then as they must today given the ubiquitous and virtuous modern green movement, not to be confused with the earlier likely fictional Soylent Green one which offended so many.

As our Soviet Ally even while being an ideological enemy during World War II found out, not following the manufacturers instructions can have unintended consequences. To be sure, no liability claims were ever pecuniarily adjudicated against them or their native operatives, at least that I remember hearing about.

But the success of their discovered and undiscovered activities in the US was likely a source of pride to the current power base of of incumbernt spy extraordinaire cum great leader Vladimir Putin and his entourage in today’s Russia. The diminutive spy is no relation to Vladimir Lenin of yore.

It turns out our World War II Ally successfully spied against us while partnering with us, imagine our mtual shame. We likely would have far less information about the scope or the names of potential collaborators if not for their reusing their one-time pad system of message encryption.

A veritable poster example of failing to recycle carefully as I would have advised.

Few dispute that the Soviets successfully implanted many spies and garnered sympathizers in the United States and that there were consequences and real threats but which few Americans understand today. The cold war was fought ideologically by Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor especially from the White House and the appropriation committees.

After all, the bad guys stole our bomb technology, saving their taxpayers a lot of money in the process, among other things. Their military advances into other countries under the guise and righteousness of workers rights as always, did indicate they were intent on rolling up Europe, at the least. They had easy pickings in some patches in the void of Germany’s second major wartime defeat in the first half of the 20th century before a period of what some call Pax Americana, a wonderful time here, during which we learned to eat too high on the hog and how to consumer more than make.

Frighteningly we also forgot how to teach the basics in our schools as social issues began to cause mission creep. Not exactly the view from our far left or that of ostensibly workers rights power brokers and sometimes anti capitalist sympathizers in the US progressive movement wich grew out of the US Communist Party. Ironically how capitalism became the savior of today’s nominally communist single party countries.

Everything is relative of course in this purview of millennial history of conflict.

This message traffic, some of which was encrypted with a one-time pad system, was stored and analyzed in relative secrecy by hundreds of cryptanalysts over a 40-year period starting in the early 1940s. Due to a serious blunder on the part of the Soviets, some of this traffic was vulnerable to cryptanalysis. Somebody who was working for the manufacturers of Soviet secret-communication materials had reused pages of some of the one-time pads in other pads, which were then used for other secret messages. This defeated the purpose of the one-time pad, which provides ideal security when each page is used exactly once and then disposed of. It is unclear as to why this fatal mistake was made, or by whom.

What is for sure is that those implicated in the messages has defined the political divide in the US ever since in subtle but real ways.

Were those implicated merely the victims of their political opponents during Pax Americana as thos eon the left say?

Or where those implicated, and others, actually a risk to the United States in an important way?

Some believe who wins elections and are handed some of the reigns of power, matter. This old ideological divide is still real.

This list of Americans is an interesting read. If you are not too concerned about being labeled a witch hunter or other politically correct smear tactic, research some of these individuals and their political alliances.