Strategic ignorance is effective because it is hard to detect; hard to point out without seeming conspiratorial; and hard to prosecute because perpetrators successfully efface the evidence that could indict them, or, importantly, they thwart inconvenient evidence from emerging in the first place, like Blair’s halting of the BAE Systems inquiry. Most troublingly, we don’t empirically know how often strategic ignorance works and just how effective it is, because the most "successful" examples of strategic ignorance are, quite literally, the tactics that work so well that they can never be detected.