[detrites]

So, you think it's impossible for the US to have maintained the integrity of any of its classification levels above public, for more than a few months, and also impossible it could have done so for decades for anything secret at all?

[9dev]

I think the government has been working hard to maintain that aura of superiority, of being the omniscient power that rules it all.

But despite this, there’s budget planning, whistle blowers, leaks to the press, corruption, and political struggle. I’m completely positive that no human organisation can keep something so far reaching secret for a prolonged amount of time.

[detrites]

The problem is that leaks prove, every time they happen, that there definitively is a given amount of successfully-hidden information, up until that time. We may also safely assume leaks are the exception not rule, and so not complete.

It'd be interesting to see a "time to disclosure" metric, of average times from classification to leak, to get a lower bound on secrecy, but it could only be reasonably considered a lower bound, the upper could be anywhere.

It's also possible agencies responsible for secrets may have worked hard to maintain an aura of being incompetent at keeping them, in order to hold an advantage over their adversaries by misdirecting efforts to the wrong areas.

[jcranmer]

UFOs are the sort of the thing that you could easily leak for something like "street cred," and as we just saw last month, there's a lot of people who would be willing to leak something just for the street cred.