My favorite counter-example to those who claim “government cannot keep a secret” is this incident that had zero whistleblowers ever:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/
The only reason we know about it today is that some scholars were digging in dusty archives and bumped into it by accident.
Btw—governments spend billions of dollars trying to keep all kinds of military and intelligence secrets.
If there is “no way to keep a secret” then they should just declassify everything and save a ton of time and money.
“Btw—governments spend billions of dollars trying to keep all kinds of military and intelligence secrets.”
Yet, very little is actually a secret. Very little. Ephemeral data is usually the only secret because of its short lifespan.
Classification is usually to protect budgets, not secrets. There are many modern examples of programs becoming unclassified and not suffering catastrophic results.
Zero whistleblowers does not mean a secret was kept, just that those that knew didn’t care to blow a whistle. Not important enough.