Unclassified secrets In puzzles

 

 the main role is given to the sender of information, while in secrecy the recipient plays a decisive role. It was October 23, 2006. Jeffrey Skilling, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, was sitting at a table in the District Courtroom of Houston, Texas. He was surrounded by eight lawyers. The entire neighborhood was swamped with TV channel vans. "We are gathered today," Judge Simeon Lake began, "for the verdict in criminal case number H-04-25, United States of America v. Jeffrey Skilling. Mr. Skilling, you may make a statement and provide any information you may require for a reduction of sentence." Skilling's up. He looked older than his 52 years. Enron, the company he turned into an energy giant, went bankrupt almost five years ago. In May, a jury convicted him of fraud. Under the settlement agreement, almost all of his assets were turned over to the former shareholders' compensation fund. He spoke confusedly, stumbling in the middle of the offers. "I am very sorry, Your Honor," he said. He said he had "friends who died, good people." And he ended up being innocent - "innocent on all counts." He spoke for two or three minutes and then sat down. Judge Lake called Anne Belivaux, who worked 18 years as a senior administrative assistant in Enron's tax department. She was one of nine people who asked for permission to speak before sentencing. "How would you like to live on $1,600 a month? And that's exactly what I'm going to do! - "A woman turned to Skilling. As a result of the company's bankruptcy, she lost her pension savings. - And that's it, Mr. Skilling, because of greed, just because of greed. You should be ashamed of yourself!" The second witness said that Skilling had ruined a good company; the third said that it was the management's illiterate actions; the fourth one attacked the former CEO directly. "Mr. Skilling has established himself as a liar, thief and drunkard," said a woman named Don Powers Martin, who has worked at Enron for 22 years. - Mr. Skilling gave me and my daughter no hope of retirement. It's time to deprive him of the opportunity to walk free." She appealed to the defendant: "You were treated to châteaubriand and champagne, and my daughter and I collected food coupons and eaten scraps. And then it went on like this. Finally, the judge asked Skilling to stand up. "According to testimony, the defendant has repeatedly deceived investors, including Enron employees, about various aspects of the company's financial health," the judge announced. The sentence was harsh: Skilling, the man who headed the company, which Fortune considered one of the most successful in the world, was sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in prison. He's going to get out of jail - if at all - an old man. "I only have one request, Your Honor," Skilling's attorney Daniel Petrocelli addressed the judge. - If you reduced my client's sentence by ten months - which is not much - he could be serving a lower-security sentence under prison rules. Just ten months less..." It was a request for leniency. Skilling wasn't a killer or a rapist. In Houston, he had a high social standing, and with a slight reduction in sentence, he wouldn't have had to spend the rest of his life among hardened criminals. "No," said Judge Lake. National Security Specialist Gregory Traverton is known for the fact that he was able to clearly distinguish the concepts of "mystery" and "mystery. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a mystery. We can't find him because we don't have the information we need. A man in Bin Laden's inner circle may be able to solve the riddle, but until we find the source of the information, Bin Laden will be at large. Another matter is what will happen in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is overthrown. He was a mystery. There was no concrete answer to that question. In order to solve the mystery, we need to analyze the available data, and the main difficulty is not the lack of information, but its abundance. Everyone imagined Iraq after the invasion in their own way: the Pentagon, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and numerous political scientists, journalists and scientists. By the way, every taxi driver in Baghdad also had his own opinion on that matter. The difference between mystery and mystery is not so small. If, for example, we consider the motives for the 9/11 attacks as a mystery, the logical response would be to collect more intelligence, increase the number of spies and obtain more information about al-Qaeda. If we consider the events of September 11th as a mystery, then we should think: wouldn't collect additional information make the situation worse? Intelligence agencies will have to improve their methods of analysis; there will be a need for thinking, skeptical people who will be able to engage in an in-depth study of the information we have on Al-Qaida. Twice a month, the CIA counterterrorism team will have to meet with counterterrorism teams from the FBI, Homeland Security and Department of Defense to get to know each other and share data. If there are any problems in the "mysterious" case, it is not difficult to calculate the culprit: it is the one who withheld the information. The situation with secrets is more complicated: sometimes we get unreliable information, sometimes we are unable to interpret the data at our disposal, and sometimes the answer to the question posed simply does not exist. Puzzles usually have a guess. Often there are no mysteries. If you were present at Jeffrey Skilling's trial, you might think the Enron scandal is a real mystery. According to the prosecution, the company was making illegal and rather strange deals. Senior executives were withholding important information from investors. Skilling, the ideological inspirer of the company's policy, turned out to be a liar, a thief and a drunk. Some information was hidden from us - and this is the classic premise of the mystery - and this is the leitmotif of the entire Enron trial. "This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen," the prosecutor said in his closing remarks to the jury. - So I'm likely to finish early in my time. It's all black and white. Truth and lies. The stockholders, ladies and gentlemen. They have the right to have company employees put their interests above their own. They have the right to know what the company's financial situation is like. They have the right to honesty, ladies and gentlemen."