Welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother.
Herman Poppleberry, present and accounted for. And let the record show, Corn, that I am not currently wearing a trench coat, nor am I hiding any secret documents in the cushions of this sofa.
Well, that is good to know, because our housemate Daniel seems a little worried that asking about state secrets might result in some mysterious figures showing up at our door. He sent us this prompt earlier today, and honestly, it is one of those questions that feels like it should have a simple answer, but the deeper you look, the more complex it gets.
It is the classic iceberg problem. You see the idiom on the surface, "it is not a state secret," and you assume there is a massive, well-defined block of ice underneath. But in reality, the definition of a state secret is often more about the process of keeping it than a static list of things that are secret.
That is it. Daniel was asking if there is an actual, physical list. Like, does the Prime Minister or the President have a leather-bound folder that just says "Secrets" on the cover? Or is it more of a fluid concept? And I love how he tied it back to the cybersecurity world, because that is where we see these military concepts living on in our everyday digital lives.
It is a fascinating bridge to build. To answer the first part of his question, we have to look at how governments actually define this stuff. In most modern states, there is not a single master list of every secret. That would be a security risk in itself. Imagine if that list got leaked! Instead, what exists are classification guides and legal frameworks. In the United States, this is currently governed by Executive Order thirteen five twenty-six.
Right, so instead of a list that says "The location of the nuclear silo is X," there is a guide that says "Any information regarding the location of strategic assets is classified as Top Secret."
That is right. The framework says information can be classified if its unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security. They have three main levels: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Confidential means "damage," Secret means "serious damage," and Top Secret means "exceptionally grave damage."
I have always found those adjectives a bit funny. Who decides what qualifies as "grave" versus just "serious"? It feels very subjective.
It is incredibly subjective, and that is actually one of the biggest points of friction in government transparency. But there is one category of secrets that is different, and this touches on what Daniel mentioned regarding Israel and nuclear capabilities. There is a concept called "Born Secret."
That sounds like a spy movie title. What does it actually mean?
It comes from the United States Atomic Energy Act of nineteen fifty-four. It basically says that any information related to the design, manufacture, or use of nuclear weapons is classified from the moment it is created, regardless of who created it. You could be a scientist in your garage who happens to figure out a new way to enrich uranium, and legally, that information is "Restricted Data" the second it enters your brain. You do not need a government official to stamp it. It is born secret.
That is wild. It is like the government claiming ownership over a thought before you even have it. But back to Daniel's point about Israel. He mentioned the concept of "Amimut," or nuclear ambiguity. That is a state secret that everyone knows exists, but the secret itself is the official confirmation.
Yes, that is it. It is a policy where the state neither confirms nor denies the existence of certain capabilities. In the legal world, especially in the United States, they call this the Glomar Response. It comes from a nineteen seventy-five case involving a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was built by Howard Hughes to supposedly mine the ocean floor but was actually a Central Intelligence Agency project called Project Azorian to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. When reporters asked about it, the agency said they could "neither confirm nor deny" the existence of the records.
And that phrase has become a staple of pop culture and bureaucracy alike. But let's talk about the "list" idea again. In Israel, we have the Military Censor, the Tzimtzura. That feels closer to a list, does it not?
It does. The Chief Censor actually issues a set of guidelines to the press. It is not a list of every secret, but it is a list of topics that must be submitted for review before publication. There is also an office called Malmab, the Director of Security of the Defense Establishment, which manages the actual protection of these secrets. So while there is no "Master List of Secrets" on a website somewhere, there is a very clear list of "Things You Are Not Allowed To Talk About."
Daniel also brought up that incredible example from the nineteen sixty-seven Six Day War. The idea that pilots were briefed only three or four hours before takeoff. That is the ultimate form of compartmentalization. If you do not know the secret until you are about to execute it, you cannot accidentally or intentionally reveal it.
That is the "Need to Know" principle in its purest, most high-stakes form. And this is where the connection to cybersecurity gets really interesting. Daniel mentioned terms like "blast surface," "Demilitarized Zone," and "least privilege." These are not just metaphors; they are direct translations of military doctrine into code.
Let's break those down. "Least Privilege" is a big one in the tech world right now. In the old days of computing, if you logged into a network, you often had access to everything. But now, the goal is to give a user the absolute minimum level of access they need to do their specific job.
That is the key thing. It is the digital version of that pilot in nineteen sixty-seven. He does not need to know the entire diplomatic strategy for the Middle East. He needs to know his target, his flight path, and his timing. In a modern corporation, a marketing intern should not have the ability to delete the entire customer database. They have "least privilege."
And then there is the "Blast Radius," which Daniel called the "Blast Surface." I love that term because it is so visceral. If a specific server gets hacked, how much of the rest of the network can the attacker "see" or "touch"?
It is just like the design of a munitions bunker. You build them in a way where if one shell accidentally explodes, the blast is contained so it does not set off the entire warehouse. In cybersecurity, we use micro-segmentation to do the same thing. We put little digital walls around every single application so that a breach in one area does not lead to a total system failure.
It is funny how we have moved from a "Perimeter" model to a "Zero Trust" model. I remember you explaining this to me a few years ago. The old way was like a castle with a moat. Once you were inside the castle, you were trusted. But Zero Trust says, "I do not care if you are inside the castle, I am going to check your ID every time you move from the kitchen to the hallway."
It is a paranoid way to live, but it is the only way to stay secure. In the United States, this became official policy with an Executive Order in twenty twenty-one. There is no moat anymore because everyone is working from home or using cloud services. So you have to treat every single request as if it is coming from an untrusted source.
Which brings us back to the state secrets. If a government operated on a true Zero Trust model, would there even be "secrets" in the traditional sense? Or would everything just be a series of tiny, fragmented pieces of information that only mean something when they are put together?
That is what the intelligence community calls the "Mosaic Theory." This is one of the most common reasons the government gives for refusing to release information. They might say, "Sure, this one document seems harmless, but if you combine it with these other ten harmless documents, a foreign intelligence service can piece together a very sensitive secret."
It is like a jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces are just blue or green blobs, but when you put them together, you see a picture of a top-secret submarine base.
Right. And that is why there is no single "list." The secret is often the relationship between the pieces of information, not the information itself.
You know, we should probably mention that if you are enjoying this deep dive into the world of secrets and security, we would really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app. It helps more people find the show, and unlike a state secret, we actually want people to know we exist.
Well played, Corn. But seriously, it does help. Now, I want to go back to the Hebrew idiom Daniel mentioned about the Shabak, the domestic intelligence agency. In Israel, the phrase "it is not a secret of the Shabak" is used for anything that is common knowledge. But the irony is that for decades, the very existence of the head of the Shabak was a state secret.
Right! I remember that. People used to refer to him only as "Resh," the first letter of his name. It was not until the mid-nineteen nineties that they started publishing the names of the directors.
It was nineteen ninety-six, to be exact. Before that, it was a state secret who was even running the agency. It is a perfect example of how the definition of what is "secret" changes as society changes. We moved from a culture of "everything is secret unless we say otherwise" to a more modern, though still imperfect, culture of "things should be public unless there is a damn good reason."
But even then, some things stay hidden for a long time. I was reading about the "State Secrets Privilege" in the United States. It is a legal rule that allows the government to block the release of information in a lawsuit if it would harm national security. The landmark case for this was United States versus Reynolds in nineteen fifty-three.
Oh, that is a dark one.
It really is. A military plane crashed, and the widows of the men who died sued for the accident report. The government claimed the report contained state secrets about the plane's mission and refused to release it. The Supreme Court agreed with the government. But then, fifty years later, the report was finally declassified.
And what was in it?
No state secrets. Just evidence that the plane was poorly maintained and that the military was trying to cover up its own negligence. That is the danger of the "State Secret" label. It can be used to protect a country, but it can also be used to protect a bureaucracy from embarrassment.
That is the "Blast Radius" of a different kind. If you allow the government to hide its mistakes under the guise of security, you erode the trust of the entire citizenry. It is a massive vulnerability in the "Operating System" of a democracy.
So, to answer Daniel's question: Is there a list? Not in the way he is imagining. There is no "Big Book of Secrets" sitting on a shelf. Instead, there are millions of fragments of information, each tagged with a classification level based on a set of subjective guidelines. The "list" is actually a set of rules for how to handle information, rather than the information itself.
And those rules are increasingly being built into our technology. When you use an app that has "End-to-End Encryption," you are essentially creating your own state secret. You are using the same mathematical principles that spies use to ensure that only the person with the "Need to Know" can read your message.
It is a democratization of secrecy. We have gone from secrets being the exclusive domain of kings and generals to something that every teenager with a smartphone can access.
But that creates a new problem. Governments hate it when they cannot get into those secrets. We see this debate all the time with "encryption backdoors." The state says, "We need to be able to see these secrets to stop the bad guys," and the tech community says, "If you build a backdoor for yourself, you are building a backdoor for everyone."
It is the ultimate security trade-off. Do you prioritize the state's ability to know secrets, or the individual's ability to keep them?
I think the military concepts Daniel mentioned give us the answer. If you have a "Zero Trust" model, you do not build backdoors. Because in Zero Trust, there is no such thing as a "trusted" government official who will never lose their key. A backdoor is a vulnerability, period.
It is interesting how these lessons from the nineteen sixties and seventies, from the battlefields and the intelligence bunkers, are now the foundation of how we build a secure internet. The "DMZ," or Demilitarized Zone, is a perfect example. In the military, it is a buffer zone between two powers. In networking, it is a sub-network that sits between the public internet and a private network.
It is a "check-point" for data. You let the data into the DMZ, you inspect it, you make sure it is not carrying a "bomb," and only then do you let it into the inner sanctum. It is a physical analogy for a digital process.
You know, Herman, I wonder if the concept of a state secret will even survive the next fifty years. With artificial intelligence able to scrape the entire internet and find those "mosaic" patterns in seconds, can anything really stay hidden?
That is a fascinating question. We are entering an era of "Algorithmic Intelligence." If an AI can look at satellite imagery of a parking lot and predict the quarterly earnings of a retail chain, it can certainly look at public data and figure out where the secret bases are. The "list" might not exist, but the AI will build its own.
That is a bit terrifying.
It is. But it also means that the only way to keep a secret in the future might be the "nineteen sixty-seven" method. Don't put it on a computer. Don't put it in a database. Keep it in the heads of a few people until the very last second.
The most advanced security technology might end up being a face-to-face conversation in a room with no windows.
That is right. High-tech problems sometimes require very low-tech solutions.
Well, before we go back to our very low-tech dinner, I want to thank Daniel for sending this in. It is a topic that is so often discussed in clichés, but the actual mechanics of it are fascinating.
Definitely. And if any of our listeners have more "weird prompts" about history, technology, or how the two collide, please do reach out. You can find the contact form on our website.
And remember, we are also on Spotify and most other podcast apps. If you want to dive into our archive, this was episode five hundred twenty-seven, so there is plenty more to explore.
Just don't go looking for the "Resh" of My Weird Prompts. We are pretty open about who we are.
I'm Corn.
And I'm Herman Poppleberry.
Thanks for listening. We will be back soon with another one.
Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye!
