"surely you have something you can include to convince us?"

Perhaps, but it's not an easy subject to breach at all, but I appreciate your honest question and will attempt a terse summary. During both my time in the military as a pawn, and during my time as a civilian trying to understand the deep state, I have continually come across two fundamental issues regardless of particular area of research:

Bankers touch everything. At first I was just trying to chase the terrorist finance networks up the chain. Thinking it probably mostly ended at some Saudi, Jordanian, UAE banks. Not true, but the problem is that post 9/11 so much of the finance network stuff was taken out of the public view, scrubbed and redacted, or otherwise hushed up. I thought this was for operational reasons, to not give up the game to the ones we were after, but after 3,5,10+ years of no real attacks on the finance network, I'm increasingly convinced they are being protected, not investigated. Now, at this level of course the main argument tends to be similar to the reasonsing used in the 2008 bailout, some variation of "but if we start prosecuting bankers, the banking system might collapse and the economy would tank and..." you get the idea. I don't buy that excuse. Anyway, the real point is that most of the reading I have done on the upper-level banking system indicates they have become supranational, interconnected systems in ways most people can barely understand. This paper is a key reading on this point: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5728.pdf As for citing sources on the relationship between Wall Street and City of London/Vatican, it gets much more tricky. This is the sort of stuff that I imagine would take a palantir type 6 degrees social graph to really unconver in a concrete way, so for now I have to admit it's mostly inductive instead of deductive reasoning. Many context clues from many books in aggregate have helped me form this opinion.

Now, on to the even more slippery subject of secret societies and orders of knighthood. The bottom line is that I don't think anyone can claim to have a holistic grasp on geopolitics/economics/strategy and at the same time ignore the many secret societies associated, for reasons that seem obvious with a little thought. I mean, if you wanted to run a subversive intelligence network, isn't the compartmentalized nature of a secret society simply a mirror of the kind of compartmentalization an intelligence agency would use? (perhaps the agency is the mirror of the society, but I digress). It's just structually set up to allow for infiltration and subversion. Now, that's not to say that is what every society is used for, or that every member is used for. On the contrary, with the rings within rings structure, the vast majority of secret society members tend to have no clue whatsoever of what is happening at the upper level. (Very much like I claim of the CIA). They are useful bodies for cover. One very particular example of this would be P2 or Propaganda Due lodge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due

For more a more scholarly type of look into this type of thing, the best author I could recommend would be Carroll Quigley. A professor of history at Georgetown, and cited by Bill Clinton as his mentor, he wrote extensively about the British round table groups influence being used as a rings within rings structure for the purposes of the British empire (later renamed the commonwealth for pr purposes). In large part, the origins of this structure was put in place by Cecil Rhodes, who got the inspiration from reading the documents of the actual Bavarian Illuminati of the late 1700's. It was always one point of contention between Quigley and what he called the plagarists (such as the John Birch society), that Rhodes was simply inspired by the rings within rings structure that Adam Weishaupt wrote about, and that there was no evidence for a connection between the ancient secret societies, and "the illuminati" and the Rhodes society group(s). (A common misconception among the lazy conspiracy theorist, even though I have found plenty of evidence that (free)masonry does get it's roots from Egyptian societies of builders, it's is often publicly disputed as otherwise.)

As for the orders of knighthood, there are some very interesting connections between certain orders and certain types of military and clandenstine operations. For example, I have found an inordinate amount of (military) operator types and those associated have membership in the Knights of Malta, and other similar groups. Associations vary though, from more than just The Vatican, they include factions in the UK/EU royal houses and aristocracies. They are often at odds as well, the other common misconception of lazy conspiracy theorists is that there is a single monolithic group. Many factions exist whose interests sometimes align, and sometimes don't. There are power plays in this region most of the world never hears about. For example, recently: https://cruxnow.com/analysis/2017/01/29/popes-takeover-knigh...

Anyway, to summarize, these are difficult subjects that are complex, full of nuance, and often lengthy, and as such don't lend themselves well to such short-term outlets like a hn comment, but that's an introduction that might help steer your own research if you are genuinely curious.

"I'm not sure what this is referring to. Can you elaborate?"

This reffering to some things JFK said after the bay of pigs fiasco, talking about making a mistake by keeping Allen Dulles (who was conviently put in charge of the commision to investigate the assassination!), and talking about how he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

"Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in his 1969 memoirs that upon the CIA’s creation he “had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the president that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.”" https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/in-1974-call-to-abolish-...

"That will protect you in your home and on your personal devices (to a degree), but it doesn't protect you in public."

I think that's a start. I'm aware that with technological progress public privacy is waning and will continue to do so, but we should at least remember the rights of privacy (including right to not be subject to search without warrant or probable cause) on our property, even if that property is digital. Capitulations about how privacy is already dead lack the nuance needed to really address the problems. We could just as easily setup attack resistent OS's and platforms as allow MS to monopolize the market.

"the vast majority of our history was spent with no anonymity and little to no privacy"

I would like to see what makes you think this is true. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of history was rife full of anonymity and privacy. Now, perhaps in a small village everyone in the village, or everyone in the family, knew what you were doing, but there is a big difference between immediate friends and family having first-hand knowledge of your goings and doings and them having knowledge of your goings and doings and storing them on insecure devices which the government can search surreptetiously at will and at a mass scale heretofore unimagined by all but the most forward looking thinkers such as Orwell and Huxley.