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Yes, I understand that DoE and the national labs aren't really part of the surveillance state. The whole confidential/secret/top secret thing, with compartments pretty much started with Manhattan Project as I understand it. That was in the 1940s, so small changes piling up over time led us to a surveillance state. Each change was justifiable, due to things like exposures of classified info, spying, 9/11, etc, and welcomed due to using classification and surveillance to fix the problems but also to cover up a multitude of sins, from budget overruns to dopey, failed designs to outright fraud. That is, once you've got a thing that you're protecting, then the surveillance state follows, complete with spy services. If semi-appropriate agencies existed before (FBI, OSS, Naval Intelligence) they get re-purposed as surveillance agencies, (OSS -> CIA) and new ones get created (NSA, DIA, NGSIA). It looks to me like there's a sort of inescapable logic, or emergent behavior that starts with protecting the Manhattan Project, and grows incrementally until you've got a surveillance state. |