"It can be taken as an axiom that all governments everywhere lie—it is inevitable. Naive people think that conspiracies are seven men around a table in a Machiavellian plot: a conspiracy is an atmosphere, or a frame of mind in which people are impelled to do things, perhaps those things that they could never do as individuals, or couldn't do at other times when the atmosphere is different—[things] the populace have never heard of, nor would they find out except by accident, or by a member of the 'conspiracy' not being sufficiently brainwashed into secrecy and spilling the beans." 

—Doris Lessing

[Edward Snowden]