I just opened your mail by accident and found out that you are going to blow up a whole bunch of people but I’m not going to tell anyone that you are going to blow up a bunch of people.
Hey, you, in the paragraph above. Are you nuts? Why not tell?
To get some kind of answer to why not tell, we have to go back in U.S. History a bit...
The Black Chamber was the United States' first peacetime Cryptanalytic Organization, and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. It was funded jointly by the State Department and the U.S. Army.
In 1929, the State Department withdrew its share of the funding, the Army declined to bear the entire load, and the Black Chamber closed down.
The new Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson made the decision to stop the State Department’s funding and years later in his memoirs he made the oft-quoted comment: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail”.
Maybe, if the Black Chamber had still been in operation in 1941, we would have been warned about the coming attack on Pearl Harbor.
Then someone could have said to Secretary Stimson: “Do Gentlemen Bomb Other Gentlemen on Sunday Mornings?”
Let us all hope that, in this Politically Correct time we live in, reading other’s mail is not considered Politically Incorrect because The Bomb is very popular at this time in U.S. and World History.
Would I kid u?
Smartfella
