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The Great Divide | 129 million classified documents at the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii, and flying to Russia. Additional information does not necessarily change the minds of people who already have a firm view. In the field of social psychol- ogy, the testing of “confirmation theory” consistently shows that people tend to more readily reject new information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. For example, when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, he said famously, “I haven’t shot anybody.” Ten months later, the Warren Commission presented evidence, including ballistic tests, that it claimed showed that Oswald had shot three people, including Presi- dent John F. Kennedy, less than an hour before making his statement. Yet many of those who believed Oswald’s public proclamation of his innocence chose to believe that the government had falsified all the incriminating evidence to tarnish Oswald (who had been killed on November 24, 1963) rather than accept that they had been wrong in believing Oswald. The charges, countercharges, and defamatory name-calling in the ) Snowden case therefore only deepened the great divide. Those who © saw Snowden as a democratic hero exposing the abuses of power of an out-of-control national security state tended to dismiss anything that depicted Snowden in a negative light as a fabrication, while those who saw Snowden as a “traitor” tended to dismiss anything that depicted him in a more positive light. When it comes to the murky universe of spy agencies, the prob- lem in deciding where the truth lies is further heightened by the possibility of deliberate deception. Spy masters are, after all, in the business of concealing their most sensitive operations. It is often considered essential that important secrets be protected by what Winston Churchill famously termed “a bodyguard of lies.” Top intelligence officials are not exempt from this practice. Consider, for example, the response to a question concerning the NSA‘s opera- tions made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013. The Demo- cratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who was on the committee, asked the spymaster if the NSA collected data on Americans. Clap- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 129 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019617