Notional Security

Apple CEO Tim Cook, together with other tech chiefs, met with U.S. President Obama for a secret meeting to discuss technological surveillance.  (ZNet)

The phrase 'national security' can mean whatever whatever anyone asserts it to mean - especially if in a position of power over others.
If one perceives one's national security as synonymous with control and power over others or world events then one has disregarded sharing power with one's people in favour of the mentality of imposing power upon.
The search for security of those who seek to manipulate others is both endless and futile because the nature of coercion is to breed hatred - regardless of whether it can be set in terms that feel justified to the aggressor.

The USA is a favoured host for the use of power on the world stage - yet it is actually hostage to influences and forces to which it has become indentured.

We might recognize that our national identities are becoming simply a leverage of manipulation rather than an expression of conscious cultural flowering.

We might realize that our notional identity - our ego or self image - is no less a leverage of a manipulative intent and THEREFORE wake up to relinquish secret manipulative intent and listen and feel for a conscious cultural flowering of an integrity that embodies and serves the whole.
Until there is indication from the ground up - of a sea change in culture - our leaders cannot break out from their Faustian pacts. The issue of secrecy is of a veiled loveless and dis honouring intent - which always corrupts its host and serves a disintegrating and rapacious death-wish dressed up as self vindicating struggle to prevail over adversity.

Maybe there is a willingness to see that such self-limiting mentality is inherently fruitless and let it go. Maybe there is a willingness to remember the true source and nature of life rather than demand life only in the terms we set it in.

Q: How can one look at the world we have made and not bring into question our very foundations of self and reality?

A: By looking only as fear and guilt dictate. Which is to say by not really seeing at all.