# 12. Secrecy ## 12.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species ### 12.5.1. Critical knowledge denial This is the obvious use of secrecy: denial of critically important knowledge puts an adversary at a disadvantage. Lack of knowledge reduces the ability of a victim to make good decisions or gain a full understanding. Not all secrets are damaging and some are quite trivial but all secrets deny a victim access to the facts to the advantage of the manipulator. Some secrets can have a truly awful physical effect on the victims, such as the use of unwitting East German victims who were tricked into taking part in drug trials by several Western drug companies in the 1970s. In these trials some patients with serious heart diseases were secretly given placebos instead of the appropriate medical treatment and many then subsequently died from lack of treatment. They were the so-called "control group" required by the Western drugs companies to prove that their new anti-hypertensive drugs actually worked - dispensable victims of murder and greed, coupled with secrecy. These victims of secrecy are doubly hurt because secrecy can be very hard to uncover and avoid, as was the case for these victims of Western medical and corporate malpractice. Again, the economics of the manipulation put the victim at a great disadvantage because the cost of discovery is simply too great for most victims. On the other hand the risk of secret revelation can be a highly "tradable" threat to the manipulator and secrets can command very great economic value.