Government Security in democracies

My own curiosity about government secrets began in the mid-sixties,
when Bertram Gross and I were working on American federal
budgetary reforms at Syracuse University. At the time he called my
attention to the Freedom of Information Act and wondered whether
it would help us to get some information from the Bureau of the
Budget. It did not. We still had to use Bert's old contacts in Wash-
ington to get what we wanted. He therefore shares indirect responsi-
bility for the conception of this book, as he first generated my interest
in matters hidden from the indiscriminating eye. Subsequently I con-
ducted a seminar on comparative government secrecy at the Hebrew
University and published a number of articles on this and the
broader subject of the politics of information.
I am still intrigued by what first captured my interest regarding
the secret affairs of government, referred to in my concluding article
as “situational secrecy.” Secrecy seems to be a question of both
geography and idiosyncracy. Note the quotation I found in my files
from that period:
The concept of a return to secrecy in peacetime demonstrates a pro-
found misunderstanding of the role of a free press as opposed to that
of a controlled press. The plea for secrecy could become a cloak for
errors, misjudgments and other failings of government.