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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Father Brown:''' For an intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make sure that nobody is looking at you.
'''Flambeau:''' But what other plan is there?
'''Father Brown:''' There is only one... To make sure that everybody is looking at something else.
|''[[Father Brown]]'', "The God Of The Gongs"}}
{{quote|''"I will periodically send my assassins to kill random conspiracy nuts in suspicious-looking ways. There is little danger that they will find out about my plans and no one would have believed them anyway, but the heroes will be convinced that they were killed for what they knew and will get so wrapped up in trying to foil my diabolical plan to [[Epileptic Trees|give all trees epilepsy]] that my real plans will go unchallenged. Plus it gives my assassins something to do."''
|[[All the Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vows|All The Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vow #84]] [[Additional Evil Overlord List Cellblock A|Cellblock A]] (see also sub-vows A - D)}}
Generally speaking, when you're a [[Diabolical Mastermind]] and you want to cover up [[Evil Plan|some kind of nefarious activity]], the general desire is to be low-key, go about one's business and [[Villain Ball|not attract undue attention]]. This is especially critical when you don't want the other guys to know that you're being nefarious all over their business. What's the point of breaking in and stealing the codebook if they know you have it and simply change the code? So you keep it simple, keep it quiet, don't rock the boat...
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...well, unless you're so clever you've thought of a cunning plan that does the exact opposite. Instead of having your agent sneak into the embassy to photograph the codebook, you're going to make huge splashy headlines to get everyone looking the other way. Why, with your plan to fake aliens landing and [[Fiery Coverup|blowing up the embassy]], surely no one will notice a code book gone missing. It would be the ''last'' thing they'd suspect.
Unless you're a [[Magnificent Bastard]] or a ''very'' proficient [[The Chessmaster|Chessmaster]], it never works. Inevitably they'll connect the fake aliens to your organization, making them wonder what you're up to, which will lead them to the (hitherto unknown) [[The Mole|Mole]] you had planted in the embassy staff, and then it's heroes getting <s>all over your business</s> all up in yo' bidness [[Oh God,
See the [[Conspicuous Trenchcoat]] for this same principle applied to costumes. Contrast this with [[Crime After Crime]]. Subtrope of the [[Kansas City Shuffle]]. For the comedic version, see [[Legitimate
An occasional subversion is someone organizing a
See also the [[Streisand Effect]].
{{examples|Examples}}▼
== [[Anime]]
* Used to extreme effect in the eleventh volume of ''[[The Kindaichi Case Files]].'' The killer followed Kindaichi throughout the two-parter mystery, killing people after they provided messages which was supposed to lead to a manuscript he wanted to keep from being published. What neither the killer nor Kindaichi realize until after the last message was a dead end is that the message itself was irrelevant. The real clue was hidden in the order of the now dead message givers. Because of the murders meant to silence them, the newspaper following the last murder would inevitably print them in order of killing, providing the same clue to ''everyone'' who read the paper, guaranteeing ''someone'' would figure it out before the killer could and prompting a desperate grasping of the [[Villain Ball]].
* In ''[[One Piece]]'', the denizens of Punk Hazard try to trick Smoker out of investigating their island by putting out toxic gas. The idea was to make him think it was still uninhabitable after a prior accident. Unfortunately, Smoker knows the history of that island and this only makes him ''more'' suspicious.
* In ''[[
* In an episode of [[Detective Conan]] a criminal attempts to acquire a demo tape that implicates him in a murder. It's especially note worthy that before the criminals attempts to acquire the tape Conan thought nothing special was on it. (He had listened to it previously in hopes of finding out why the artist was being stalked.)
* The [[Jack the Ripper]] conspiracy graphic novel ''[[From Hell]]'', and the real-life Prince Albert Victor-centric conspiracy theory it dramatizes, hinges on the monarch of the world's most powerful nation being so threatened by the possibility of unsubstantiated (though true) allegations from four London prostitutes that she has them all murdered.▼
▲== [[Comics]] ==
▲* The [[Jack the Ripper]] conspiracy graphic novel ''From Hell'', and the real-life Prince Albert Victor-centric conspiracy theory it dramatizes, hinges on the monarch of the world's most powerful nation being so threatened by the possibility of unsubstantiated (though true) allegations from four London prostitutes that she has them all murdered.
** Not only murdered, but killed in such a needlessly elaborate and gruesome way that it inevitably attracts the attention of half the country, never mind the obsessive detective.
** Though Victoria only wanted the situation quietly taken care of. It was her bad luck that the man she picked to do it turned out to be an increasingly insane psychopath who insisted on mutilating the bodies in an ever more shocking and attention
* Classic ''[[Superman]]'' villain the Prankster has actually started hiring out his services as a distraction. So while you're pulling off whatever crime you've got planned, Superman is busy dealing with Prankster. Naturally, it didn't take Superman long to figure this out.
== [[Fanfic]] ==▼
* At the climax of the [[Dungeon Keeper Ami (Fanfic)|battle for the High temple of Crowned Death]], Ami gets posessed by both [[Battle in The Center of The Mind|Crowned Death's Lesser Aspect]], and her [[Big Damn Heroes|sister Tiger]]. As a result, scrying no longer works on her. Furthermore, due to the high percentage of the Light-affiliated mages distracted by the battle, Ami's Lightworlder allies immeadiately suspect [[Revealing Coverup]]. Ami, of course, didn't intend this at all. However, in light of her reputation as a class-one [[Magnificent Bastard]], she decides correcting them to be more trouble than it's worth. ▼
* In [[XSGCOM]], the SGC are being threatened with the public figuring out what's going on behind the scenes. The truth is that Anubis has attacked Earth but they obviously can't tell the public that. So instead of trying to cover up the attack, they pull out a unique version of [[Sarcastic Confession]], ''[[Batman Gambit|posing the aliens as coverup of something else and leaking THAT out to the public in order to make the aliens appear as just another conspiracy theory]]''. And it works!▼
* In [[Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality]], Harry explains this is why he doesn't simply deny the crazy rumours about him which ''aren't'' true.▼
▲* At the climax of the
▲* In ''[[XSGCOM]]'', the SGC are being threatened with the public figuring out what's going on behind the scenes. The truth is that Anubis has attacked Earth but they obviously can't tell the public that. So instead of trying to cover up the attack, they pull out a unique version of [[Sarcastic Confession]], ''[[Batman Gambit|posing the aliens as coverup of something else and leaking THAT out to the public in order to make the aliens appear as just another conspiracy theory]]''. And it works!
▲* In ''[[Harry Potter and
== [[Film]] ==
* The bad guy in ''Die Hard With a Vengeance'' just '''had''' to get cute when he left McClane [[Death Trap|strapped to a bomb]]; {{spoiler|that stupid aspirin bottle led the cops right to him.}}
** On the other hand, his brother did it perfectly in the first ''[[
** Simon's plot in Die Hard 3 is actually yet another example of this, {{spoiler|detonating bombs around New York City, forcing Mc}}{{spoiler|Clane personally to jump through hoops to find the others, then convincing the police there's a bomb planted in an unspecified NYC school - all so the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street will be relatively free of emergency services. Additionally, his first bomb detonation blew a hole in the street adjacent to the Federal Reserve, allowing him to openly move his tunneling crew into position in the guise of city engineers sent to repair the damage}}.
* If the traitor in the ''[[Mission: Impossible (
* In ''[[
** In another Bond example, the scheme to steal nuclear weapons in ''[[
** In the first movie, ''[[
** One more Bond example: In ''[[From Russia
*** In fairness, what they're trying to steal is a top-secret cipher machine -- and those become useless the instant the enemy knows one is missing, because the first thing they'll do is change out the entire compromised cipher. Trying to make the enemy believe that the machine wasn't stolen but just lost beyond recovery in a giant disaster is about the only plan they can have.
* If the bad guys in ''[[
** Possibly justified as his murder would have been thoroughly investigated, while framing it as part of random shoot out meant the case was ALMOST quickly closed.
* The Alliance in ''Serenity'' (and the predecessor series ''[[Firefly]]'') spent a whole lot of time and effort hunting down River Tam, including murdering just about everybody who may have been in contact with her in order to cover up what she learned through her telepathy and being in the same room as several high ranking Alliance members. River, being insane, probably didn't understand what she knew and, in any case, wasn't in any position to tell anybody even if she did. But the Alliance's campaign of persecution gave Serenity's crew a big motive to find out and make the information public knowledge.
* The Conspiracy in ''[[Left Behind]]'' killed a conspiracy theorist, ransacked his house, and left his corpse lying in it, about 24 hours after The Rapture has caused '''billions''' of people to disappear and killed thousands more in the resultant chaos. You'd think adding one ''more'' disappearance would be simple for any competent villains. Instead, his friend the [[Designated Hero]] finds the body, but since he ends up [[Deal
* Averted in ''[[The Bourne Series (
* Agent Nick Memphis from ''[[Shooter]]'' smells fish when the police officer who got a shot at the alleged-would-be assassin of the President dies few days later in a "botched robbery".
* Noticeably averted in ''[[Seven Days in May]]'', about a plot to take over the US via military coup. Several people who appear to have been murdered turn out later to have been merely detained on justifiable pretexts. There's only one suspicious death (of a White House aide carrying direct evidence of the conspiracy who ''had'' to be stopped) and only luck enables the signed confession he was carrying to survive the plane crash and be found in time to avert the coup. The closest you get to this trope is when an orderly is [[Reassigned to Antarctica|reassigned to Hawaii]] after discussing an apparently innocuous signal with the protagonist, which is what first arouses his suspicions.
* In ''[[Indiana Jones and
** Possibly this was a [[Batman Gambit]] on the Thuggees' part, as they'd already prepared ways to [[Mind Control]] Indy via voodoo dolls and black blood of Kali. The assassin and secret passage could have been an audition, to see if he was worth ensorcelling; had his trance not been broken, he'd have been a useful agent to seek out more relics for the cult.
** He's there because a nearby village told him that people from the palace had abducted their children, and he let them know this. So he probably wasn't going to just give up, and seeing as he is a world renowned archaeologist and tomb raider, the kind of guy who has made a career out of finding what he's looking for, it makes sense to kill him. Especially since he might inform the British authorities.
*** Especially since this is still colonial-era India. You can torment all the peasant villagers you want and the authorities aren't going to pay much attention to them, because 'they're just bloody wogs', but if an educated white man tries to file a police report with the British you are ''far'' more likely to get a response. Once they know Professor Jones is likely on to them they have a ''very'' compelling need to kill him before he can actually tell anyone.
* Played with in ''[[Race to Witch Mountain]]''. The lead characters are quick to publish a book on what happened to them during the movie, specifically they're [[Genre Savvy]] enough to know [[The Government]] can't touch them without validating their claims.
* In ''[[The Other Guys]]'', a highly armed crew makes a daring heist into a jewelry store using a wrecking ball. As it turns out, {{spoiler|the real target was not the jewelry store but the adjoining accountancy firm where the "robbers" surreptitiously snuck into and altered the books}}.
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*** The code had been published years before, and since no one was able to break it, had been put into use. The point of killing the family was to prevent anyone leaking that the code actually '''could''' be broken.
*** Which is still a straight example, since only the NSA knew it was their code, and the kid had only told the NSA that he broke it. Killing them all should not be plan A.
*** Standard procedure for knowing a cipher has been compromised is to change it. In this case its doubly egregious, since no one single cipher should be continuously used for that many years anyway. You rotate the things at irregular intervals for a ''reason''.
* In the movie ''Sniper 3'', the sniper's mission to kill an old war buddy turned Vietnamese drug lord/rogue intelligence agent is interrupted by a second sniper trying to kill ''him''. This is due to the fact that said drug lord is one of three people who had participated in a war crime in Vietnam, the other two being the NSA director and a powerful senator, and they wanted him dead to protect themselves, and kill the killer to ensure that the sniper didn't learn why. Given that they had destroyed all physical evidence of their crimes thirty years earlier, the only reason why it gets discovered is because they tried to cover it up.
** Played even more straight in that the cover-up is entirely needless; there is any number of 'legitimate' reasons why the target needs to die, being a druglord and rogue agent, and there is no reasonable expectation the sniper should have the slightest suspicion about shooting yet another bad guy in the endless parade of bad guys he normally gets assigned to go shoot.
== [[Literature]] ==
* This happens a lot in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' novels involving the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. You'd think people would have learned that if you try to cover something up in Ankh-Morpork, Commander Samuel Vimes is only going to get suspicious, dig deeper, and then come down on you like a ton of rectangular building things.
** But is subverted in a rather interesting fashion in ''[[
** Also subverted in ''[[
*** Indeed, it's also revealed eventually that a Klatchian pretended to be the villain and fled to Klatch in order to lure Vimes there so he could actually help.
** And in the ''[[Discworld]]'' novel ''[[
*** It helps that the Empire's army of 700,000 men is already confused about why the barbarian army of seven men is cheerfully marching out to fight them. The [[Big Bad]] tries to be [[Genre Savvy]] when he realizes the rumour won't be squashed, by spreading the tale that those ghosts in fact are there, [[Refuge in Audacity|and that this has enraged the spirits of the Empire's ancestors]]. It backfires because the empire's armies have been fighting a lot of civil wars, and many soldiers are not keen on meeting the spirits of their late opponents either.
* In the [[James Bond]] novel ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', evil mastermind Blofeld decides to best way to lie low is to operate a castle with a poison garden for people wanting to commit suicide. If they change their mind, the "gardeners" assist them. No one is going to pay any attention to that, right?
** The novel explicitly points out that Blofeld had gone entirely off his nut by this point, and had actually been expecting the authorities to shut him down soon. In fact, the entire reason Bond was asked to go there in the first place was to kill "Shatterhand" in exchange for some intelligence, seeing as the garden itself was perfectly legal. He just happens to recognize Shatterhand as the man who killed his wife.
* Being a [[Gentleman Bastard Sequence]] [[Magnificent Bastard|Locke Lamora]] loves this trope. Case in point: running a con on a wealthy nobleman, then disguising himself as one of the secret police and informing the mark that he's being robbed.
** Partially justified in that informing the mark that he was being robbed and ordering him to play along meant that the Gentlemen Bastards didn't have to go through all the trouble and cost of pretending to prepare for a long and expensive journey. It was simply exceptionally unlucky that {{spoiler|the nobleman's wife was unknowingly friends with the real head of the secret police and confided in her}}.
** The second book takes it all [[Up to Eleven]], with Locke running this trope back and forth between at least two different marks, at once exposing his plans and yet diverting suspicion away from himself.
* How many ''[[Doc Savage]]'' pulps started out with the villain trying to pull a preemptive strike on the Man of Bronze, getting his minions slamdunked, and Doc then becoming curious about what was going on?
** And the second book of [[Aaron Allston]]'s ''[[Doc Sidhe]]'' ''Doc Savage'' [[Expy]] specifically mentions that sort of thing happening.
* In [[Sandy Mitchell]]'s [[Ciaphas Cain]] novel ''Duty Calls'', Cain's [[Fake Ultimate Hero]] status bites him in the ass again when {{spoiler|a rogue Inquisitor}} tries to have him
* In [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]'s ''[[John Carter of Mars|Thuvia, Maid of Mars]]'', Carthoris is framed for Thuvia's kidnapping. Not his love would have let him leave the matter alone, but it always helps, to implicate his honor.
* ''The Zero Game'', a mysterious game is set up and then all but one of the participants are killed off in suspicious ways. The worst part is that the game is really just an elaborate ruse to get an abandoned mine reopened. Which they could have gotten much more cheaply and easily just by simply asking. And not only was the mine completely unnecessary to their plans, it actually made it more difficult.
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* This is a recurring theme in (and, in fact, often the entire basic plot of) many of [[Christopher Brookmyre]]'s books, notably ''[[Country of the Blind]]'' and ''[[Boiling a Frog]]''. And ''[[Be My Enemy]].'' And ''[[Quite Ugly One]] Morning''. Essentially, the crimes that catch the protagonist's attention are almost always attempts to cover up a previous and otherwise unnoticed crime.
* In Jules Verne's ''Master of the World,'' our hero investigates a mountain that's producing odd rumblings, but is unable to climb to the top. After giving up and filing it under "unexplained," he gets a note saying, "Stay away from that mountain, or it'll go badly for you!" If Robur had just left him alone, the hero would have dropped the case.
* In ''[[The Pelican Brief]]'', the protagonist publishes writes up a
* In ''[[Sherlock Holmes|The Hound of the Baskervilles]]'', the villain steals one of an intended victim's new boots, then returns to swipe one of an older pair, while ''returning the first one'', presumably so the owner would assume he'd just misplaced it. Granted, Holmes was bound to solve the case anyway, but the fact that the boot ''not'' bearing its owner's smell was brought back again clinched his suspicion that there was a real, trained dog involved. Had the culprit stolen all four boots and returned nothing, Holmes couldn't have ruled out the possibility that one of the hotel staff had a profitable sideline stealing guests' possessions.
* Both of the Fargo Adventures by Clive Cussler written so far depend on this. The Fargos find some obscure item which is at least four steps away from in one case an artifact the villain wanted to find, and the other a secret the villain wants to conceal. So the villain sends assassins after them, letting the Fargos know that their totally innocuous discovery was important somehow. Had they just purchased the item at a fair price, or simply ignored them entirely, the villain would have succeeded.
* Lyra Silvertongue, in ''[[His Dark Materials]],'' carries out this skill with the modifiers of being [[Guile Hero|the hero]] and a [[Little Miss Badass|twelve-year-old girl.]] Her strategy, when she finds out that the cops are looking for her companion, Will, is to talk to the cops themselves, pretending that Will is her brother, to throw them off the trail. Will, who prefers to blend in and go completely unnoticed, finds this very irritating.
* [[Don Quixote]], [[Older Than Steam]], presents a parody: In his first sally, [[Daydream Believer]] in [[Chivalric Romance]] books, Alonso Quijano, [[Mad Dreamer|pretends he is an]] [[Knight Errant]] don Quixote. He tries to live the [[Medieval European Fantasy]] in [[Real Life]] Spain. He doesn’t find any [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons|dragon]], [[Robe and Wizard Hat|enchanter
* In the ''[[
* In ''Uneasy Alliances'' (book #11 of [[Thieves' World]]) when one [[MacGuffin|nice trinket]] by accident fell in the local gluemaker's hands,<ref>in Sanctuary unclaimed corpses are legitimate material for glue, and if something was left on it - finders keepers</ref> a wizard and his assistant tried to wrestle it away, attracted attention of another wizard (who discovered what it does) and lost. When the master discovered that his apprentice started troubles without even trying to simply ''buy'' the thing back when it was one more bauble picked from a corpse, he didn't take it well.
{{quote|'''Markmor''': You mean you never made the man an offer?! You mindless dungheap, where was your brain?
'''Markmor''': You were dealing with a businessman. What do you think he does? He buys and sells things, that's what he does.
'''Markmor''': At times like this I could almost justify destroying you, talented or not. Brain damaged is what you are. }}
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* In ''[[Veronica Mars]]'', it's the Kanes' coverup of {{spoiler|what they believed to be}} the circumstances of Lily's death that alerts Keith to their dishonesty.
* ''[[Hawaii Five-O]]'' super agent Wo Fat had a cunning plan to distract archenemy Steve McGarret...which alerted the good guys something was up and allowed them to discover Wo Fat's real operation which, up until then, they had no idea was actually going on. It turns out China wanted to test a new missile but keep the Americans from analyzing it via radar, so Wo Fat was sent to disable the Pacific radar net for a critical few seconds, which he does by kidnapping the daughter of one of the men responsible for the system. Absolutely no one on the American side realizes this is happening. For some reason, Wo Fat believes McGarret will find out, and launches his distraction plan that he'd previously prepared in case he ever needed it. Once Wo Fat's involvement is known, police, intelligence, and military get together to try to figure out what Wo Fat is up to, discover a glitch in the radar system that had occurred a few days earlier (during a test to make sure that the system could be brought down), and while investigating it, on the off chance it has something to do with Wo Fat, uncover the kidnapping and blackmail.
* Season 5 of ''[[
** Double-Subverted in Season 8, when a villain disguised as an EMT suspects Renee Walker recognized him. He tells his boss he can get rid of her and Bauer, but the boss orders him to wait out of concern for this trope. Ultimately, the guy goes ahead with an attempt anyway, but by that time Renee's already realized where she recognized the man from and alerted CTU to the fact.
*** Not to mention what happens afterwards is what ultimately brings Jack back into the field for the final episodes of the season. It's entirely possible that some of the more high ranking villians in that paticular plot would have gotten away had it not been for Jack's involvement. [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Nice job breaking it villian!]]
* In the ''[[
* A lot of the murderers in ''[[
* This was the plot of the bad guys in the second season [[Numb3rs]] episode "Rampage". {{spoiler|A man (who was a perfectly innocent civilian dad aside from having a brown belt in martial arts) was blackmailed into going on a shooting rampage in the FBI building and provoke an emergency evacuation in order to cover up getting a list of key witnesses in a trial out of the building. In a slight subversion, while the FBI was able to connect the shooter to the criminal, the guy was off the grid. The break came when Charlie analyzed the shooter's path, discovering that the only conscious choice he had made was to avoid shooting two people, one of whom was carrying the list.}}
* In [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]], The Mayor inexplicably has Faith kill a previously unheard of archaeologist. Lampshaded:
{{quote|
'''Buffy:''' What page are you on, Wes? 'Cause we already got there. }}
* This is how ''[[The X-Files]]'' starts. All the weird brainwashing, floodlights, and murders undermine [[Agent Scully|Scully]]'s skepticism. Of course, it stays throughout the series, but...
* An episode of ''[[Burn Notice]]'' had Michael break into a high security laboratory to put ''back'' a certain item. To "explain" the breach (without implicating the person who'd stolen the thing in the first place), he grabbed a couple of expensive-looking items and tossed them in the trash, so it would look like they'd stolen something. Else.
* In one episode of ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'', Jessica is shot at while investigating at the behest of the accused's wife, while the accused himself is in jail. She quickly realizes {{spoiler|it was the wife, who was worried Jessica was starting to think her husband might be guilty, and wanted to provide evidence otherwise}}.
* One episode of ''[[
* An episode of [[Republic of Doyle]] begins with Des being arrested ([[Noodle Implements|while wearing a snorkel]]) after robbing a convenience store and a male strip club while drunk, and leading every police officer in St. John's across the city to distract them from the ''real'' target that evening, a priceless statue.
* ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' invokes this trope in the opener of the last season; it's not until an assassin from the cult of the Pah Wraiths shows up to kill him and vows that he "will never find the orb of the Emissary" that Sisko learns it even exists (let alone that he needs to find it).
** Pulled earlier {{spoiler|by [[Spy Master|Garak]] when he sees a Romulan assassin on the station. Garak blows up his own shop to make Odo think the assassin did it, but Odo discovers otherwise that the assassin works with ''poisons'' not explosives.}}
*** And then {{spoiler|the assassin gets killed anyway as though someone was covering their tracks, which only stokes Odo's curiosity further. By the time Odo and Garak figure out what's going on, the Romulans and Cardassians are making a joint first-strike on the Dominion.}}
* An episode of ''[[Simon and Simon]]'' had a tourist hire the Simon Brothers to find out why she was the victim of a series of petty thefts: first her camera, then her purse, then her hotel room was broken into... Turned out she'd snapped a picture that showed a man someplace he wasn't supposed to be in the background, and he was trying to get the film. (She had already dropped it off to be developed, when he started stealing her stuff looking for it.)
* In a variant compressed into less than five seconds, the team on ''NCIS'' needs to locate some terrorists hiding among any of a dozen warehouses. Knowing they're pressed for time, Gibbs whips out a shotgun and blasts a nearby street light, which causes the terrorists' rooftop lookout to immediately open fire and give away the bad guys' position. Had he had the sense to quietly keep his head down, the team would've been too late to stop them.
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* Crocs in ''[[Pearls Before Swine]]'', when they try to sneak into Zebra's house [http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2009/09/10 via crawlspace].
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Splinter Cell|Splinter Cell: Conviction]]'', where if the conspirators hadn't sent thugs to try and kill Sam Fisher he would never have been aware there was even a conspiracy in the first place.
{{quote|
* ''[[Clock Tower (
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* In ''[[Star Wars]]'' adventure ''Dawn of Defiance'' {{spoiler]a [[Heel Face Mole]] attempts to get the early rebellion to kill a Hutt crime lord that's a loose end in the Empire's covert ops. This would have worked if the Hutt wasn't keeping a comatose Jedi Master captive.}}
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Girl Genius]]'' lampshaded this in [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20060802 these] [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20060804 two] strips, where Tarvek teaches Vrin the right way to cover up things that are best kept hidden.
** And before that, two [[Ax Crazy|Jaegermonsters]] discuss [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20031017 "De kind of plan vere hyu lose you hat"].
*
** An odd meta-example: Antimony was given the [[Faceless Masses]] treatment on pages [http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=399 399] and [http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=400 400], presumably so she wouldn't distract from the foreground. Several fans took notice of this, and [[Epileptic Trees|theorized]] that there was some sinister significance behind Annie's blank-faced grin.
* ''[[Nodwick]]'''s hometown. [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|No secret societies taking it over]]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20070905160913/http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/gamespyarchive/index.php?date=2007-05-30 Nope].
* ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' had [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1028.html this] in one of ''[[MythBusters]]'' arcs:
{{quote|
'''Adam''': They're like some sort of humourless government Men in Black.
'''Man in Black''': {appearing disconcertingly in their path} There's no such thing as Men in Black.
'''Adam''': Er, Jamie? Men in Black?
'''Jamie''': I'm going with "plausible" on that evidence.
}}
* ''[[Freefall]]'': Sam has bad luck with this. [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff900/fv00875.htm]
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* On ''[[
* On ''[[Young Justice]],'' [[Humanoid Abomination|Klarion]] and his allies cast a spell that splits the world in two, with one dimension for adults and one for children and teens. While the heroes are eventually able to trace the magic to its source and stop them, they fail to notice that in the confusion, [[Archnemesis Dad|Sportsmaster]] and [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|the Riddler]] {{spoiler|steal Starro's tissue sample from STAR Labs}}. Klarion's colleague [[
* Used in ''[[
== Real Life ==
* The excesses of the [[Richard Nixon|Nixon Administration]] might not have become public if flunkies hadn't been carrying out completely unnecessary break-ins, with more cunning plans piled on top to prevent the preceding cunning plans from coming to light, which instead attracted even more attention.
** The thing was, Nixon didn't even ''need'' to have flunkies break into Watergate. He was [[Villain
*** Nixon was facing a weak opponent because the stronger opponent, Ed Muskie, was marginalized after a letter, forged by Nixon aide Ken Clawson, claimed that Muskie was a racist. Watergate was simply a continuation of the cheating they did before.
*** Lesson: [[Spoof Aesop|Don't cheat more than you have to]].
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** Notice, however, that nobody thought "OMG SECRET AIR FORCE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM", so the cover up ''worked''.
** The notoriety of the Roswell Incident stems from the fact that the first cover story used actually ''was'' "we've captured a flying saucer." (This lasted for about a day, and was the brainchild of a foolhardy local PR officer.) The replacement "weather balloon" cover passed without notice for decades; it was only in the 70s (once eyewitnesses became conveniently hard to locate) that UFO enthusiasts could latch onto the original cover story as a "smoking gun" and build an entertaining conspiracy theory out of it.
* Scientology's [
** In the government's defense, US law prohibits denying anyone a government job simply because of their choice of religion. Until after Scientology had revealed itself as a criminal conspiracy as well as a cult, the background checks might or might take note of the fact that 5000 Scientologists are in positions in the US government but this would be considered data no more significant than the presence of 5000 Pastafarians.
* This very wiki sometimes falls into this, through badly placed spoiler tags. For example, if someone apparently dies (only to show up again many issues later), and an article describes it as "her {{spoiler|apparent}} death"... there are very few words that would fit into that spot, and most of them indicate that the person's still around in some sense. So unless we all get into the habit of saying "her {{spoiler|real, permanent, not a dream, not a robot, not an imaginary story!}} death", it's probably best to stick the spoiler at the end, where it could mean any number of things, including things that happened to someone else entirely.
* This trope is the reason (some) government agencies will simply flat out deny/refuse to comment on any and everything. Saying that something is incorrect/won't work may imply that someone is on the right track of duplicating something or similar situations.
* The scenes of [[Serial Killer]] Ted Bundy's crimes were suspiciously free of evidence, including doorknobs and light switches with absolutely no fingerprints on them.
* During - and even before - WWII, many nuclear physicists correctly deduced that their foreign colleagues were working on top-secret atomic bomb programs because they were no longer publishing research papers.
** Averted in the case of the science fiction story "Deadline", which featured a fairly accurate description of the atomic
* Tommy Robinson's case, recursively. UK had a football hooligan turned political activist arrested for filming from outside the courthouse during a particularly infamous case, while being ordered by the court not to do this. Cue "#FreeTommy" hashtag, photos and screenshots from his videos all over internet, people outside UK turn to thumb nose at them with "[[Banned in China|It's illegal to report this story in the UK.]]" and donate to his bail and legal fees. Surprise, a locally infamous case becomes infamous world-wide. Then, of course, those opposing this began to call the first crowd names, throw themselves into strawman arms race with wild abandon, provoke responses in turn and give journalists more to talk about, thus inevitably attracting attention of people who somehow managed to miss the initial explosion. Who do you think wins? {{spoiler|Answer: Change.org, because it got an opportunity to [[Playing Both Sides|milk ''both'' sides]] for profit, rather than mostly being limited to the market of virtue signalling globalists like before, and now that a "loud" precedent was established, it's in a better position to do this. }}
* If a news article on a crime is strangely sparse on details about the suspect, there are those who will be led to wonder if this arises from trying to hide that the suspect belongs to certain groups, whereby the actions it's accused of serve to reaffirm stereotypes about said groups. That straight white men are rarely extended the same courtesy doesn't help.
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