And suddenly the unimportant records that don't exist but were also a hoax but also implicate the-other-guy are about to be made public... suddenly an "ongoing investigation" is the new excuse.

> The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

-- The origins of Totalitarianism (1951), by Hannah Arendt