By Way of Deception

A Detailed Critical Book Report on Espionage, Institutional Secrecy, and the Corruption of Truth

Book: By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer
Authors: Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy
First published: 1990
Subject: Intelligence training, covert operations, institutional secrecy, political deception, and the moral consequences of clandestine power

Introduction

By Way of Deception is presented as the memoir of Victor Ostrovsky, a Canadian-born Israeli who says he was recruited and trained as a katsa, or Mossad case officer, during the 1980s. Co-written with Canadian journalist Claire Hoy, the book combines autobiography, intelligence instruction, institutional criticism, and allegations about covert Israeli operations.

It became famous not merely because of what it claimed, but because the Israeli government attempted to stop its publication. A temporary injunction against its American distribution was issued in September 1990 and then quickly overturned. Contemporary reporting described the action as an extraordinary attempt by a foreign government to restrain publication in the United States. Israel also pursued restrictions in Canada before abandoning the effort once the book was circulating publicly.

The suppression attempt transformed the book from an intelligence memoir into a political event. Readers naturally wondered: if the book was nonsense, why try so hard to stop it? Yet that question does not automatically prove every allegation. Governments may try to suppress material because it exposes genuine secrets, because it combines truth with error, because it identifies methods or personnel, or because even inaccurate claims can endanger operations.

That ambiguity is central to reading the book responsibly.

By Way of Deception should therefore be approached neither as sacred revelation nor as disposable propaganda. It is best understood as a disturbing witness statement from inside a secretive institution, filtered through memory, personal grievance, publishing incentives, political conflict, and the near impossibility of independent verification.

Its deepest subject is not simply Mossad.

Its deepest subject is what happens when deception ceases to be an emergency instrument and becomes an institution’s ordinary language.

I. Historical and Institutional Context

Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence service. Its official description emphasizes intelligence collection, strategic operations, and support for national-security decision-making. Like comparable agencies, it works largely beyond public visibility, where operational secrecy is treated as essential to protecting sources, methods, and personnel.

Israel’s security culture developed under unusually intense pressures: war, terrorism, regional isolation, hostile neighboring governments, attacks on civilians, and continuing threats to the state’s survival. These conditions help explain why Israeli intelligence institutions acquired exceptional prestige and latitude.

Understanding those pressures is necessary. It does not, however, settle the moral questions raised by the book.

A government may face real enemies and still commit abuses. An intelligence agency may prevent attacks and still become unaccountable. National vulnerability can produce legitimate vigilance, but it can also become a permanent license for secrecy.

Ostrovsky’s account emerged in 1990, near the end of the Cold War and after decades in which clandestine services around the world had participated in coups, proxy wars, assassinations, disinformation, political interference, covert financing, and secret alliances. The book therefore entered a culture already suspicious of intelligence agencies, but still fascinated by their mythology.

In that mythology, spies are guardians standing outside ordinary morality because ordinary morality is supposedly inadequate for the dangers they confront.

Ostrovsky attacks that mythology from within.

II. The Meaning of the Title

The title refers to Proverbs 24:6. The expression is often rendered in English as “By way of deception, thou shalt do war,” though translations vary considerably. The wording can also be translated as waging war through wise counsel, strategy, or guidance.

Mossad’s own historical website states that the verse, translated there as “By subterfuge will you wage war,” was regarded as an unofficial slogan before the 1970s. The familiar English rendering should therefore not be treated as the only possible meaning of the Hebrew text.

This translation issue matters because “wise strategy” and “deception” are morally different ideas.

Strategy means thinking ahead.

Deception means deliberately constructing a false reality inside another person’s mind.

The book’s title chooses the darker rendering because it captures Ostrovsky’s argument: deception is not merely one tool among many but a governing principle. People are recruited through deception, allies are managed through deception, enemies are manipulated through deception, officers are controlled through deception, and the public is protected from uncomfortable knowledge through deception.

The title therefore functions as both description and accusation.

III. Overview of the Book

The book broadly divides into two forms of material.

The first is Ostrovsky’s account of recruitment and training. These sections describe the selection of intelligence officers, psychological testing, surveillance exercises, source recruitment, the construction of cover identities, clandestine communication, operational planning, and the cultivation of informants.

The second consists of stories and allegations concerning Mossad activities outside Ostrovsky’s immediate experience. These include accounts of foreign operations, political maneuvering, covert relationships, assassinations, regional conflicts, and alleged failures to share intelligence with allies.

The distinction between these two types of material is crucial.

The training narrative is the portion most closely connected to Ostrovsky’s claimed firsthand experience. A contemporary Christian Science Monitor review regarded his description of officer training as perhaps the book’s most authentic material. The larger operational claims are more difficult to evaluate because they may depend on briefings, internal stories, secondhand knowledge, interpretation, or reconstruction.

This does not mean the broader claims are necessarily false. It means their evidentiary status is different.

A responsible reader must continually ask:

• Was Ostrovsky physically present?
• Did he read an internal file?
• Was he told the story by another officer?
• Is he reconstructing events from memory?
• Is the episode supported by independent reporting?
• Could the story have been exaggerated inside the institution itself?
• Could the author’s later political and personal conflicts have shaped its presentation?

A memoir can reveal institutional truth without getting every factual detail right. It can also contain accurate details organized into a misleading overall picture.

IV. Recruitment: Selecting the Person Who Can Live Two Lives

One of the book’s most revealing themes is that intelligence work depends less on brute force than on psychological flexibility.

The ideal officer must be able to maintain composure, improvise, recognize vulnerabilities, establish rapid intimacy, and lie without displaying the physical signs most people associate with dishonesty. He must remember invented details, adjust stories under pressure, and present different versions of himself to different people.

This is not simply acting.

An actor performs before an audience that knows it is watching fiction. An intelligence officer performs before people who believe the performance is reality.

The moral distinction is immense.

The officer’s personality becomes an instrument. Charm becomes a lockpick. Empathy becomes a reconnaissance device. Friendship becomes an access route. Curiosity becomes interrogation without the visible machinery of interrogation.

The unsettling insight is that qualities normally associated with human connection can be detached from care and repurposed as mechanisms of control.

A person may listen closely because he respects you.

Or he may listen closely because he is mapping the rooms inside your mind.

V. Training and the Manufacture of Operational Reality

Ostrovsky’s training descriptions form the structural backbone of the memoir. They present intelligence work as the careful construction and management of realities.

An officer does not merely hide facts. He builds a world that another person can enter.

A credible false identity requires history, habits, paperwork, motivations, social context, professional knowledge, and answers to questions that have not yet been asked. The strongest cover is not a dramatic lie but a life-shaped enclosure with enough ordinary detail to feel inhabited.

The book emphasizes surveillance and countersurveillance, covert communication, source cultivation, operational security, and the use of cover stories. Such practices are recognizable features of human intelligence work, even when specific details vary among agencies.

The larger lesson is that successful deception usually contains a substantial amount of truth.

A crude liar invents everything.

A skilled deceiver changes one decisive relationship between otherwise accurate facts.

He may give a real name with a false purpose, a genuine document with a misleading context, or truthful information designed to produce the wrong conclusion. This form of deception is harder to detect because the victim can verify much of what he has been told.

The bars of the cage are built from facts.

Only the door is imaginary.

VI. Human Intelligence and the Exploitation of Need

Human intelligence depends on sources: people with access to information, institutions, technology, political circles, or military planning.

Sources may be motivated by money, ideology, resentment, fear, ego, love, adventure, revenge, coercion, or the desire to feel important. Intelligence officers study these motives and determine which emotional lever can move the individual.

This produces one of the book’s darkest implications: weakness becomes a commodity.

A lonely person can be given companionship.

An overlooked person can be made to feel significant.

An angry employee can be offered revenge.

A financially desperate official can be offered money.

A frightened person can be offered protection from a danger the recruiter may have exaggerated or manufactured.

In ordinary ethics, vulnerability creates a duty of care.

In clandestine recruitment, vulnerability creates an opening.

The officer may create a relationship that feels profound to the source while understanding it primarily as an operation. Affection, praise, solidarity, and reassurance can all be deployed tactically.

The source believes he has encountered someone who understands him.

The service believes it has acquired an asset.

This is where the book becomes less a spy story than a study in the industrialization of betrayal.

VII. Compartmentalization

Intelligence agencies divide information so that employees know only what is necessary for their assigned roles. Compartmentalization can protect operations and limit damage if a person is captured, compromised, or turns against the organization.

Yet compartmentalization carries a darker consequence: it separates action from moral understanding.

One officer recruits a source.

Another analyzes the reports.

Another designs an operation.

Another authorizes it.

Another supplies equipment.

Another communicates with political leadership.

Each participant may see only a fragment. Responsibility becomes distributed so widely that no one experiences himself as the author of the whole event.

This resembles an assembly line of conscience.

The technician says he only installed the device.

The analyst says she only evaluated the information.

The case officer says he only handled the source.

The official says he acted on expert advice.

The politician says operational details were not disclosed.

Everyone touched the machine. No one claims to have built it.

Compartmentalization can therefore protect secrets while also protecting participants from the emotional weight of their own actions.

VIII. The Book’s Institutional Accusation

Ostrovsky does not merely accuse particular officers of wrongdoing. His broader charge is that secrecy creates an organizational culture capable of insulating itself from correction.

Inside such a system, loyalty may become more important than truth.

Failure can be concealed.

Success can be exaggerated.

Internal rivals can manipulate information.

Political leaders can receive selective briefings.

Operations can be presented as unavoidable after alternatives have already been quietly excluded.

The agency controls the evidence by which its conduct will later be judged.

This is a profound democratic problem.

Public institutions are usually restrained through some combination of law, journalism, elections, audits, courts, legislative hearings, and access to records. Intelligence services cannot be exposed to all these mechanisms in ordinary form because genuine operational secrets require protection.

The result is an accountability paradox:

The institution most capable of manipulating information is also the institution whose claims the public is least able to verify.

Citizens are told that secrecy is necessary.

Because of secrecy, they cannot independently determine whether that necessity is being abused.

IX. The Contested Reliability of the Memoir

The book’s sensational reputation should not tempt readers into treating every story as established fact.

Contemporary critics challenged Ostrovsky’s accuracy, scope of access, and presentation of events. A sharply critical review in Commentary argued that the Israeli government’s attempt to suppress the book guaranteed it publicity, but disputed the reliability and significance of much of its content. Other reviewers found parts of the account plausible or valuable, especially its institutional portrait and training material.

Ostrovsky’s relatively brief period in the organization is relevant. Contemporary accounts described a career of roughly three years, beginning with his selection in 1983. This raises legitimate questions about how one comparatively junior officer could possess authoritative knowledge of decades of operations across many countries.

But limited tenure does not make his testimony worthless.

Institutions transmit stories internally. Training materials reveal assumptions. Briefings expose methods. Even a junior member can observe organizational habits that senior members have normalized and stopped noticing.

The safest conclusion is therefore layered:

1. Ostrovsky appears to have had genuine Mossad experience.
2. His training account is generally more credible than claims far beyond his direct participation.
3. Some broader allegations remain disputed or unverifiable.
4. Israel’s attempt to suppress the book demonstrates that the government considered its publication consequential, but does not validate every claim.
5. The memoir is strongest as evidence of a mindset and organizational culture, not as a flawless operational archive.

The reader should hold skepticism in both hands.

One hand questions the author.

The other questions the institution he accuses.

X. The Dark Consequences of the Material

1. Deception Can Escape Its Original Boundaries

A state may initially justify deception as a weapon reserved for hostile governments or violent organizations.

But methods become habits.

Once an institution rewards officers for manipulating enemies, it may begin manipulating allies, journalists, legislators, rival agencies, its own personnel, and eventually the public.

The crucial moral boundary is not between truth and secrecy. Governments sometimes have legitimate reasons to withhold information.

The boundary is between withholding a fact and manufacturing a false reality.

Secrecy says, “We cannot tell you.”

Deception says, “We will cause you to believe something that is not true.”

When the second practice becomes routine, democratic consent begins to rot from the inside.

Citizens may still vote, but they vote inside a political reality partially designed for them by actors they cannot see.

2. National Security Can Become a Self-Sealing Argument

The phrase “national security” can identify genuine dangers. It can also end discussion.

Officials can argue that an operation must remain secret because exposure would threaten security. If critics demand evidence, the evidence is withheld for the same reason. If failures occur, they too may remain classified.

The claim becomes self-sealing:

• The government is right because it has secret information.
• The public cannot see the information because it is secret.
• The secrecy proves the matter is dangerous.
• Anyone challenging the secrecy can be portrayed as endangering the nation.

This structure allows legitimate protection and institutional self-protection to wear the same uniform.

Ostrovsky’s book asks whether secrecy protects the country, the agency, individual careers, political leaders, or some shifting mixture of all four.

3. Allies Become Targets Rather Than Partners

One of the memoir’s bleakest implications is that an intelligence service may view friendly countries not as communities of citizens but as territories containing useful people, documents, technologies, financial channels, political factions, and influence networks.

An ally can therefore be simultaneously partner, marketplace, cover environment, recruitment pool, and surveillance target.

Intelligence cooperation is rarely pure friendship. Governments exchange information while withholding other information, protecting their own sources, and pursuing separate interests.

The danger arises when strategic distrust becomes total.

If every ally is treated as a potential mark, cooperation becomes a theater in which each side performs loyalty while privately preparing for betrayal. Diplomacy then operates over a floor riddled with trapdoors.

4. Intelligence Can Create the Reality It Claims Merely to Observe

Intelligence agencies are often described as collectors of information. Yet covert action can move beyond observing events and begin producing them.

An agency may fund organizations, cultivate political factions, plant stories, pressure individuals, encourage defections, manipulate perceptions, or provoke reactions. Once it does so, its reports no longer describe an independent world.

They describe a world partly shaped by the agency itself.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop:

1. The agency predicts instability.
2. It intervenes secretly.
3. The intervention contributes to instability.
4. The resulting instability is cited as proof that the original prediction was correct.
5. The agency receives more authority and resources.

The institution becomes both meteorologist and weather machine.

5. Informants Become Disposable Human Infrastructure

The romantic mythology of espionage often centers the officer. Yet the person at greatest risk is frequently the source.

A recruited source may lose employment, family, liberty, identity, or life. The service can relocate an officer, terminate an operation, or deny involvement. The source remains inside the country and social world he has betrayed.

The officer may regard the source sincerely and still be structurally required to place the mission first.

This creates a fundamental inequality.

The source risks becoming the person who sacrifices everything for a relationship that officially does not exist.

When states turn human beings into information pipelines, they may begin calculating lives according to operational yield. A person becomes valuable because of access and expendable once that access disappears.

6. Moral Injury Spreads Through the Institution

People who repeatedly lie, manipulate intimacy, exploit weakness, and conceal consequences may suffer moral injury even when they believe their work protects lives.

The damage need not appear as theatrical remorse. It may surface as cynicism, emotional detachment, alcoholism, paranoia, contempt, fractured relationships, or an inability to trust affection that is not strategic.

An officer trained to search constantly for motives may eventually become unable to believe in motive-free kindness.

Every conversation acquires a second layer.

Every friendship might be recruitment.

Every accident might be an operation.

Every disagreement might be manipulation.

The officer survives professionally by becoming difficult to deceive, but may pay for that ability by becoming unable to trust.

Deception does not remain pointed outward. It colonizes the deceiver.

7. The Public Loses the Ability to Distinguish Exposure From Manipulation

Books such as By Way of Deception create an epistemic dilemma.

If the memoir is accurate, it exposes serious abuses.

If it is partly inaccurate, the inaccuracies may conceal the genuine revelations.

If intelligence agencies routinely practice disinformation, their denials become difficult to trust.

Yet the mere existence of disinformation can also be used to dismiss every inconvenient claim.

The result is a fog in which certainty becomes scarce and suspicion becomes abundant.

This can produce two equally dangerous responses.

The first is blind obedience: “The agency protects us, so criticism helps the enemy.”

The second is total conspiracism: “Everything is controlled, so no evidence can be trusted.”

Both positions surrender critical judgment.

The first worships institutions.

The second worships suspicion.

A mature reading must resist both.

8. Whistleblowing Becomes Almost Impossible to Judge

Secret institutions create brutal dilemmas for insiders who believe wrongdoing has occurred.

If they remain silent, abuses may continue.

If they speak publicly, they may expose sources, methods, colleagues, or operations unrelated to the alleged wrongdoing.

Governments can label them traitors.

Supporters can romanticize them as heroes.

Publishers can reward sensationalism.

Foreign adversaries can exploit their claims.

Because much of the evidence is classified, the public may have no reliable way to distinguish principled disclosure from revenge, exaggeration, espionage, personal instability, or some combination.

Ostrovsky occupies this morally unstable position.

He portrays himself as a disillusioned insider exposing institutional danger. Critics can portray him as a junior former employee monetizing secrets and grievances. Both interpretations may contain elements of truth.

Whistleblowers are human beings, not stained-glass saints. Their motives can be mixed while their revelations remain important.

9. Prior Restraint Can Advertise the Material It Seeks to Destroy

Israel’s effort to block publication became part of the book’s legend. The legal controversy generated international coverage and made the volume far more attractive to readers. Contemporary commentary recognized that the suppression attempt had dramatically increased attention.

This is the political version of trying to extinguish a candle with gasoline.

The attempted ban also raised a serious free-expression question. Should a foreign state be able to prevent publication in another democracy because it believes the material threatens national security?

The answer cannot be carelessly absolute. Publishing operational identities or information that foreseeably exposes people to immediate harm creates genuine ethical danger.

But allowing governments to suppress criticism merely by invoking security would turn the press into a permission-based institution.

The burden must therefore remain extraordinarily high. Otherwise the agency accused of deception becomes the authority deciding which accusations the public is allowed to hear.

10. The Myth of Omnipotence Can Strengthen Intelligence Agencies

An exposé may weaken an intelligence service by revealing wrongdoing.

It may also strengthen the service by making it appear nearly supernatural.

Readers can emerge from By Way of Deception believing Mossad sees everything, penetrates every institution, controls every political event, and executes complex operations without error.

That conclusion is dangerous even when intended as criticism.

It grants the agency mythic dimensions, erases institutional failures, encourages fatalism, and can nourish antisemitic conspiracy theories that portray Jewish people collectively as components of a secret global apparatus.

Mossad is a state intelligence service. It is not “the Jews,” world Jewry, Judaism, or a mystical racial network.

This distinction must be defended without hesitation.

Criticism of Israeli state conduct is legitimate. Converting such criticism into claims about Jewish collective guilt is not analysis. It is bigotry wearing a borrowed trench coat.

The book should therefore be read as an allegation about institutions, officials, methods, and state power, not as evidence of an ethnic or religious conspiracy.

11. Endless Exception Can Destroy the Rule

A security service may argue that extraordinary threats require extraordinary methods.

Sometimes they do.

The danger comes when the extraordinary becomes permanent.

Temporary secrecy becomes institutional culture.

Emergency surveillance becomes routine collection.

Exceptional violence becomes established doctrine.

Unusual deception becomes administrative habit.

The exception devours the rule and then continues wearing the rule’s name.

A democracy cannot survive if its public ethics apply only when nothing important is at stake. Ethical principles matter precisely when violating them seems useful.

Otherwise they are decorations, not principles.

XI. The Book’s Moral Philosophy

The moral universe implied by By Way of Deception is consequentialist: an action is judged primarily by whether it protects the state or advances the mission.

Within this framework, lying is acceptable if it produces useful intelligence. Manipulation is acceptable if it neutralizes danger. Cooperation with questionable people is acceptable if it serves strategic objectives. Collateral harm may be accepted if decision-makers consider the larger outcome worthwhile.

The difficulty is that intelligence agencies operate with incomplete knowledge.

Consequentialism requires predicting consequences, but covert operations produce chains of effects no planner can fully anticipate. A manipulated faction may later become an enemy. A protected asset may commit atrocities. A successful assassination may create a martyr. A planted story may outlive its tactical purpose and poison public understanding for decades.

The institution claims permission to commit morally hazardous acts because it can foresee the greater good.

Yet the institution often cannot foresee the greater good.

It can only estimate it behind classified doors.

This is the book’s deepest ethical nightmare: enormous moral permission combined with limited knowledge and minimal public correction.

XII. Deception and the Democratic Soul

Democracy requires more than elections.

It requires a workable relationship between reality, public knowledge, and consent.

Citizens must possess enough truthful information to judge leaders. Legislators must know enough to oversee agencies. Courts must be able to examine evidence. Journalists must be able to investigate claims. Officials must face consequences when they exceed lawful authority.

Intelligence work complicates every part of this process.

Complete transparency is impossible. Complete secrecy is intolerable.

The solution is not abolishing intelligence but constructing serious oversight: independent courts, legislative committees with genuine expertise, protected internal reporting channels, inspectors general, auditable authorization procedures, limits on surveillance, and penalties for misleading overseers.

Oversight cannot be ceremonial.

A committee that receives only information selected by the agency is not overseeing the agency. It is attending an agency-produced theatrical performance with government stationery.

The democratic task is to preserve operational secrecy without granting moral sovereignty.

No service should become a state within the state.

XIII. How the Book Changes the Reader

The book trains the reader to notice manipulation.

That can be useful. It encourages attention to incentives, cover stories, selective disclosure, emotional leverage, and the distance between an institution’s public language and private interests.

But this education carries its own danger.

Once a reader learns that appearances can be engineered, he may begin treating every appearance as engineered. Healthy skepticism can mutate into a worldview in which coincidence disappears and invisible planners explain everything.

This transformation is psychologically seductive because conspiracy thinking makes chaos feel designed.

A designed horror can seem more tolerable than an accidental one. At least someone is steering the vehicle, even if the driver is monstrous.

The harder truth is that history is produced by conspiracies, institutions, accidents, incentives, errors, personalities, public movements, material conditions, and unintended consequences all colliding at once.

Intelligence agencies are powerful actors within history.

They are not the hidden authors of history itself.

XIV. Strengths of the Book

The book’s principal strengths include:

Its demystification of intelligence work

It replaces some of the tuxedo-and-gadget fantasy with patience, paperwork, observation, rehearsed identities, psychological assessment, and the cultivation of human sources.

Its attention to institutional culture

Even disputed memoirs can reveal how insiders understand rank, loyalty, secrecy, failure, prestige, and obedience.

Its moral discomfort

The book refuses to let “national security” operate as an automatic ethical solvent. It asks what clandestine methods do to individuals, alliances, institutions, and public life.

Its relevance beyond Mossad

The questions apply to every intelligence service with significant power: Who watches it? Who audits failure? Who determines whether secrecy protects lives or careers? How can legislators evaluate claims they are forbidden to discuss publicly?

Its exposure of intimate power

The book understands that espionage is not only geopolitical. It enters friendships, marriages, professional relationships, private shame, financial desperation, and the human desire to be recognized.

XV. Weaknesses and Limitations

Uneven evidentiary authority

The author’s direct experience does not automatically authenticate stories about events he did not personally witness.

Sensational framing

The book is structured to shock. That may reflect shocking material, commercial presentation, or both.

Limited independent verification

Many intelligence claims cannot be definitively confirmed because records remain classified, participants deny them, or documentation is unavailable.

Potential personal bias

Ostrovsky’s departure from the service and conflict with the institution may have shaped his interpretation. Bias does not invalidate testimony, but it must be considered.

Risk of institutional overgeneralization

The actions of particular officers or units do not necessarily establish uniform policy across an entire agency.

Conspiracy amplification

Readers can misuse the material to support sweeping claims about Israel, Jews, international politics, or unrelated historical events. The text demands disciplined interpretation.

XVI. Final Assessment

By Way of Deception is not most valuable as a catalog of secret operations.

It is most valuable as a warning about systems that train human beings to control perception while shielding themselves from reciprocal observation.

Its disputed status is part of its meaning.

The reader confronts an accusation that cannot be completely verified against an institution that cannot be completely inspected. That uncertainty is not a side issue. It is the political condition produced by secrecy itself.

The book does not prove that every clandestine operation is immoral. States face real threats. Intelligence can prevent attacks, disrupt violent networks, recover hostages, expose weapons programs, and provide leaders with information necessary to avoid catastrophe.

But necessity is not innocence.

An institution can perform essential work and still require restraint. In fact, the more essential and secretive the institution becomes, the more dangerous blind trust becomes.

The darkest consequence of the book’s material is not that spies sometimes lie. Everyone already knows that.

The darker consequence is that organized deception can become a parallel system of government: one that manipulates events, filters what leaders know, exploits human vulnerability, distributes responsibility until guilt evaporates, and claims that public ignorance is evidence of institutional success.

Once such a system becomes culturally untouchable, citizens no longer know whether secrecy serves democracy or democracy serves secrecy.

That is the cold ember left after the final page.

A free society may sometimes need hidden operations.

It must never permit hidden operations to determine what freedom means.