ABSTRACT
The hearings and submissions under study are, essentially, rather repetitious annual presentations of these alleged Soviet economic indices, which have been basic to American foreign policy and defense spending, or at least have been widely used to justify them. Since the CIA is an intelligence agency, which is supposed to have access to Soviet ‘closed data,’ the problem of such data has to be re-stated even if it is familiar enough. In the USA, for example, a person who has no institutional ‘affiliation’ has, nevertheless, access to statistics—a term which originally meant ‘state data.’ The right to such access is often purely legal rather than socially useful. Citizens of Western democracies are familiar with a hierarchic system of classified data: military data are classified in this way in their countries. The Soviet regime extends the concept of military-strategic data to embrace all ‘state data,’ that is, all data of state importance.
