Sure, I do contracting work for the military. There are hundreds of millions of secrets kept every day with hundreds of thousands of people keeping their mouths shut. Leaking is exceedingly rare.

You have not provided any evidence or examples, just a “trust me”, which is essentially worthless. Also, there is a difference between a secret and a conspiracy. Secrets can survive for a long time, whereas history suggests that conspiracies rarely, if ever, succeed long term.

Well, you know that the military has a lot of secret stuff you know nothing about right? Let’s use Area 51 as an example. Leaks like Snowden or Manning are a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount of secrets that were not leaked.

As far as examples of successfully kept secrets, I can’t give those, because I’m in on it.

All a conspiracy is, is a group of people keeping a secret.

As far as conspiracies not being successful long term, history tells us no such thing. Conspiracies with tons of people are successfully kept every single day, only to be discovered decades later when something is declassified for example.

You can never prove if a conspiracy to keep a secret is not successful if you never knew it existed.

Am I making any sense?

The military has a much bigger threat of prison for yourself than a company that the investors sue

Oh absolutely. My point was strictly the assumption that many people can’t keep secrets. Depending on ideology, reprisals, or personal ethics (good and bad), secrets can be kept by a startlingly large group of people.

I’ve seen estimates as high as 10% of the population of east Germany were spying on their neighbors.

I agree. Humans like sharing things, even if they shouldn't. We're bad at keeping secrets. I was just making the point that your claim of leaks in the military isn't necessarily comparable to a leak about a company. You do have a point about the large numbers of service members - that would raise the chances of something happening.

They are indeed different. But if they were compromised, it doesn't mean that all employees there know. It would probably be a handful of engineers only. Maybe one day one of them will make a blog post with all the details, however, there are more incentives to keep their mouths shut than otherwise. If they come publicly about this, they will get a lot of unwanted exposure (which most people don't like), they will certainly lose their jobs, they will have to talk about that in every job interview they do, they will likely get sued due to NDA breaches, etc which will actually prevent them from being hireable in many places (specially security firms). So, it's much easier for these people, if they morally object this, to just quit, find another job and move on. They'll likely tell their friends and family not to use lastpass, but that will only travel so far.

D-Day and the operations around it? Various price fixing cartels that were eventually prosecuted?

Naming conspiracies that have never leaked is kind of hard, since we wouldn't know about them. So you have to look for examples of things that were talked about after they stopped being relevant, or that were uncovered without anyone blabbing.

enron maydolf haliburton its literally everywhere you look

Those all broke, that's how you know about them

But how long did they run for

JFK, 9/11, and Epstein spring to mind for major conspiracies. I think anyone with a head on can see the government bodies tasked to investigate those affairs were rife with conflicted interests, duplicitous individuals, and some intent that they should be as narrow investigations as possible. Those secrets have been kept or at the very least the limited hangout worked so well that people think only nuts question them.

What about “JFK”? What’s special about the fraction 9/11? Are we talking Epstein from welcome back kotter?

You sound paranoid.

Your comment makes no sense. Purposely muddying the waters does not move the discussion forward.