Governments can’t lie: a government isn’t a sentient being and couldn't “lie” anymore than a moon rock or a tree could.

Now individual people, they can most certainly lie, but even that in no way whatsoever defines what other individuals - even in the same organization - will or won’t do. Therefore, the best anyone can hope to say of any secret (conspiratorial) project is that the secrecy of the project cannot be guaranteed.

That is no where near saying that project secrecy is inversely proportional to the number of people in the know.

Or is it?

Doug.

It's not quite that simple. Governments are corporate bodies of people who make policy. Those policies can and do constrain what can and cannot be said by both the decision makers and their servants. Therefore a government, or government organ can be said to lie if there has been a policy decision to do so.

But isn't this getting dangerously close to the "no politics rule?

Cheers

Jon

There's no "no politics rule;" politics can be discussed as long as the other rules of the BABB are observed--no bad language or name-calling, and must be relevant to the forum in question. Space history and current space policy are closely linked to many political issues in several different countries.

__________________
--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

I don't see the point of the OP, sorry. Is the point, "HBers who say 'the government lies!' are wrong, because governments can't lie, being non-sentient beings?" If so, it seems like kinda pointless semantics.

I agree with Jigsaw, that's pointless semantics. "The government" is a collective noun for the people who make policy decisions and all the people who carry them out and enforce them. It could be a bit disingenuous to use one term for such an amalgam of competing interests and agencies, as if the FDA, HUD, IRS, FAA, and FBI all speak with one voice. However, as JonClarke explains, governments make policies, and have rules and systems to enforce those policies on their members. As such, a government can have a policy of secrecy (for instance, the USSR and their policy of not sharing information about their own space program, or about their missions until after they happened).

The more people involved, the more likely you are to have someone develop a conscience, or get too drunk one night and mouth off, or brag to his mistress during pillow talk, or any of a myriad of ways of spilling the beans. Saying it is inversely proportional is a strict fact if you measure "possible sources of a leak". Each person is a possible source of a leak. That is a strict comparison without any evaluation of the ability of individuals to keep secrets, their complicity and agreement with the desire for the secret to remain, the possibility of reprisals and each individual's response to those possibilities, etc.

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said, "It is possible for three people to keep a secret if the other two are dead."

It's safe to say there's no way to guarantee the secrecy of any project for good.

I would suggest that you read this thread closely
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=16099

__________________
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Big difference between blatent politics and politcs related.

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

I was trying to point out that the number of people "in the know" behind any conspiracy or project does not necessarily preclude a secret from remaining a secret. I think that how secret a project or "conspiracy" remains a secret is only as good as the people with knowledge of the secret are in keeping the secret, not the number of people keeping the secret.

I think groups of people (including those in governments) can be quite good at keeping secrets when and if they want to. If a group of talented, dedicated people having the expertise to land people on the moon actually succeed in landing people on the moon, why is it assumed that a similar group of talented, dedicated people having the expertise in keeping something secret cannot likewise succeed in keeping that something secret?

What I'm trying to say that's logically defensible is that there's no evidence that NASA tried to keep anything secret.

Doug.

It's very hard to really keep secrets. In the case of "secret" defense projects, the people who need to have the secrets are investigated and, where appropriate, issued security clearances. Most such people are motivated to keep quiet by patriotism and, perhaps, the possibility of hard time at Leavenworth. Even so, the projects may be compromised by foreign spies (Stalin knew about the "secret" Manhattan Project), and even the public may know the "secret." I know people who were buzzed by F-117 stealth fighters while the US governement was denying the planes even existed.

That may be so, but you know as well as I do that there is always one person who tips the coversation from one to the other - and next thing you know there's a free-for-all.

__________________
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

One such system being compartmentalization, where only that part of the secret needed to perform a task is revealed to an individual or team. For instance, my brother worked on some comm gear for the USAF during the late 80s. Although his team knew the operational and environmental capabilites of their equipment, that's about all they knew. During my tour with the air force, I was cleared for the same type of information - TS and above - it is taken quite seriously.

As pointed out in an earlier thread, the lion's share of Apollo hardware was not compartmentalized (or even classified, for that matter) - that is, folks knew exactly where their particular widget fit into the big picture. IMO, this fact alone would place the number of people privy to the hoax in the tens of thosands - not sustainable. So HBs are left with the idea of the government (or cabal de jour) having viable lunar hardware, but deciding beforehand (since mission planning was also freely disseminated) to instead launch a hoax.

To me, this is the strongest evidence against a hoax program.

__________________
In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1

Engineers don't work well under complete compartmentalization. While you work within a certain design scope, you know where things fit. When I was working on a seeker head for a missile, I knew the precise environment at the front of the missile, but I also knew what was happening elsewhere in the machine because it affected what I was doing.

Technicians in the military are used to "black box" work -- working on self-contained modules whose inner workings are unknown to them. But Apollo wasn't built like that. And it's very true that engineers were expected to be familiar with the whole project. Most of the materials that have survived from that era are the familiarization documents held in private collections.

And I have been approached by people claiming to have been in U.S. security at the time who tell me that the Soviets had indeed penetrated Apollo. If that turns out to be true, I can't imagine how a hoax would have been kept secret.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I would respectfully disagree that the secrecy is not sustainable. See the transcript from PBS NOVA's "Submarines, Secrets, and Spies". It's a fascinating read (and better show) about one of the best secret keeping organizations on the planet.

Doug.

Large-scale secrecy is attainable only with military protocols. You cannot operate an open project involving hundreds of thousands of people -- of which only perhaps one-tenth is fully aware of the key elements -- according to civilian protocols.

It's also defensible to say that often the enemy knows more about your operations than your own civilians. The missions of the USS Halibut have only recently come to light, but people in the Soviet Union knew about them long ago.

There is also the effect of perceived security. When Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October, there was considerable consternation among defense and intelligence elements of the government that Clancy had obtained secret information. In fact Clancy had merely been considerably resourceful, relying on information that was assumed by these people to be secret, and perhaps had been protected by some protocol, but which in fact was publicly available to people who persisted.

The detailed operation of the ELF radio system, for example, was considered secret. However, Clancy claimed he had found public information about it. And sure enough, I was able to locate in the library of the University of Michigan and environmental impact study written prior to the ELF system's construction. This study contained almost enough engineering data that someone else could reproduce the system. There were scale drawings of the equipment and a detailed description of its operational methods.

Apollo too has its persistently resourceful fans. No one has proved more resourceful than scale modelers, whose devotion to accuracy motivates them to search out previously unknown information and even some material that was thought lost or secret.

For all this to have taken place without one single inkling of a hoax, over a number of decades, is fairly significant.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

John Walker profile

__________________
In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1

Cylinder:

I agree: John Walker was a traitor.

Was he the first person or the 10 thousandth person to betray something worth betraying? "All's it takes is one" does not necessarily mean the next one, no matter if 3 or 3 thousandth happens to be the number of the next person involved.

Ya got me Jay: what's ELF?

Doug.

Extremely low frequency. It is a system that Subs can use to communicate covertly with Command I think. They may even be able to send while submerged by towing a long string of transmitters or something. I could also be way off, but I think I have the gist of it.

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Yes, ELF = extremely low frequency. It's a complex system of incredibly large antennas buried in the ground in the American Midwest. They have the ability to trasmit anywhere on the globe, even to submarines submerged halfway across the planet. But at the very low frequency at which the system operates, it can only transmit very slowly. And the submarine can't talk back, and requires a long wire trailed behind the sub in order to receive the message. So the messages are short, and one-way.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Likewise, the interior cockpit set of the B 52 in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" was so realistic that Kubrick's associates were sure he was under investigation by the FBI. The story goes that when the film came out, SAC was curious but he simply interviewed people involved with the plane, did research and openly requested and obtained declassified information to help design and build the set.