The Culture of Secrecy
Ted Gup, a very fine and serious journalist, has an important essay in today's Washington Post on the American culture of secrecy. More and more information is being classified as secret by the government, courts, and corporations, Gup writes, and this obsession with secrecy is a real threat to American citizens and security.
For the past six years, I've been exploring the resurgent culture of secrecy. What I've found is a confluence of causes behind it, among them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming to me was the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and representative government atrophies into a representational image of democracy as illusory as a hologram.
The examples Gup provides are truly horrifying.
Fourteen states have signed secrecy agreements with the Agriculture Department under which they will be notified about contaminated foods but agree not to ask about the source of those foods or the markets and restaurants that carry them. A federal database set up to warn people about dangerous doctors is inaccessible to the general public and available only to those in the health-care field. A government-run database designed to give the public early warnings about unsafe vehicles and tires does not reveal certain negative findings out of concern that they may "cause substantial competitive harm" to the manufacturers.
Gup has a new book out on the subject, Nation of Secrets. Check it out.
