A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation
unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable "sunshine
era." Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting
tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from over
classification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this
dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in
the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential
resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first
term of Obama-Biden.
After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret,
Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we
observe variation across administrations. While some
administrations deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional
secrecy, the book shows excessive secrecy was a persistent problem
well before 9/11, during Democratic and Republican administrations
alike. Regardless of party, administrations have consistently
worked to weaken the system's legal foundations.
The book reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers,
rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright defiance; an
army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions labels
all manner of documents "top secret," while other government
workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a
"sensitive but unclassified" designation. For example, the health
effects of Agent Orange, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking
out of Midwestern hog farms are considered too "sensitive" for
public consumption. These examples and many more document how vast
the secrecy system has grown during the sunshine era.
Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld, justice
eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest flouted,
"Secrecy in the Sunshine Era" reveals how our information society
has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.
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