Martin Mayer Quotes
The more urgent the message, the more slowly it moves—but those are the penalties of security.
Martin Mayer, Author, The Diplomats, 1983
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The new security procedures for allowing foeign students to study in the United States caused huge delays in the process and messed up a system that had been working well for years. It didn’t occur to the Secretary that a new system might be more efficient. That was the main reason for most organzations changing their systems--to gain efficiency.
The “wrong” people to Helms. Were Americans who disagreed with his methods and politics—especially members of Congress who wanted to make the CIA more accountable for its actions. If nothing is ever written down and everything is secret, there is no practical way of holding the agency accountable in a democracy. Helms was later convicted to perjury for lying to Congress.
This instruction referred to the illegal COINTELPRO program whereby FBI Director Hoover not only ordered the FBI to illegally spy on African American organizations, but actually interfere with their operations and by leaking personal sexual information and trying to ruin the reputations of numerous Black leaders including Rev. Martin Luther King. See {584581}. This illegal program actually specifically named and targeted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Nation of Islam. Hoover ordered that the program be kept secret. However, in what is a humorous historical twist, a civil rights organization organized a “black bag” burglary—the same kind of illegal break in that the FBI had been practicing against Black groups and others—broke into an FBI field office and stole this and other documents which they then made public. Otherwise the contents of this program might never have come to light.
Feynman was then a young brilliant graduate students working with colleagues far senior to him. He not only criticized the lax security of the safes, but when combination safes were later installed, he would infuriate the army security people by “hacking” the safes when scientists had lost their combinations.
When discussing and planning redistricting What makes this quotation so noteworthy is the fact that to the expert at redistricting, security is so important and E-mail an anathema. The reason is that most redistricting by a majority in a state legislature has little to do with fairness and protecting the meaning of peoples’ votes. It is very often motivated by something that is illegal (eg diluting Black’s voting impact) or untoward, embarrassing and scandalous (eg getting rid of a Congressman the party leaders do not care for—not being ideological enough. Very often, courts or the Justice Department overturn redistricting schemes or the media embarrasses the party who controlled the redistricting. In almost all these cases, the “smoking gun” is the statements or writings of the redistricting leaders. (For an example, see {634844} .)Therefore some redistrictors behave in methods similar to the Mafia, foreign spies, or an illegal monopoly conspiracy.
Martin Prager Mayer was the writer of 35 non-fiction books, including Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (1958), The Schools (1961), The Lawyers (1967), About Television (1972), The Bankers (1975), The Builders (1978), Risky Business: The Collapse of Lloyd's of London (1995), The Bankers: The Next Generation (1997), The Fed (2001), and The Judges (2005).
