In Information War there are no trusted communications. All sides engage in sustained deception, in ceaseless, never repeating, ever changing variety. The cherry on top, is that all this mostly false, always alarming, news media content is delivered over a the internet - a network built by spys to serve their purposes - which are not the peaceful purposes of the vast majority of human network users.
Anonymous networks are fatal to civilization. That's because when a network is promiscuous and universal like the internet it is available to the entire population of a planet; which by definition, includes the most ruthless and technologically sophisticated criminals alive.
Which brings us to secrets, to the hidden part of government, of community the secret agencies and factions charged with defending the nation against the unseen, the unspeakable, that-which-cannot-be-disclosed.
The earliest 'black cabinets,' the first official national intelligence agencies, were formed to protect power. Royal power, national power, power represented by a constitution - even power-taken-for-granted in a careless phrase like 'our democracy.'
Before spies became a behind the scenes institution and were afforded an innocuous title like 'the intelligence community,' before we had the bureaucrats and espionage professionals, we had prophets.
Prophets are often held to be crazy, at least after they start to prophesy. Alexander Grothendeick was the greatest mathematician of the last several centuries. After creating whole fields of his discipline, AG 'went into silence,' in the 1991, cut off all contact with former friends and colleagues in the mathematical/academic community. AG was said to be mad. His belief that human beings could be, and were being controlled, by powerful, non material entities was cited as evidence.
Spies have always controlled information. That means news and popular entertainment.
Spies gave us Kit Marlowe's "Jew of Malta" (part of a scheme to extort Jewish bankers) and they also gave us "The Merchant of Venice" part of the same scheme by way of making peace with the extorted Jewish bankers.
Cecil, Verulam, Walshingham were the Elizabethan spy masters who controlled the books and broadsheets, who used the popular culture to create threats and honeypots, fomenting public enthusiasm for the settlement of the new world while fueling animosity for targeted individual and beliefs. They framed enemies, promoted friends and cursed and destroyed rivals, just as they do today.
Elizabethan spooks had not a fraction of the technical control over the information into the individual mind that their successors, our modern spooks have. The theater in Shakespeare's day might influence how we thought and felt about Catholic, Spanish, the new world; today, with comprehensive technological control of individual information feeds, the covert NatSec infrastructure controls what we think, and what we are capable of understanding.
Control of Information by technology conferred ultimate power, and the Intel agencies had to have it, so they took it, only to find that the power they had obtained came to control them. It's that kind of a power.
John F Kennedy wanted to smash the CIA "into a thousand tiny pieces and scatter them to the winds"
– unlike politicians before and after him, he meant what he said. The motivation wasn't just Bay of Pigs bungling and subsequent embarrassment, it was knowledge of the scope of CIA/DARPA social control systems, the pedo blackmail rings and creepy occultism of the secret societies.
CS Lewis book, "That Hideous Strength " may be relevant
http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/…/PDFs/HideousStrength_CSL.pdf