Secrecy is like a pair of hands around the throat of democracy, cutting off the flow of oxygen to the brain," says Case Western Reserve journalism professor Ted Gup in his new book, Nation of Secrets. In it, he documents how government, the courts, universities and colleges, and other institutions have recently and radically stepped up their efforts to dam the flow of essential information to the public, compromising its ability to make informed judgments, whether about the officials they elect or the products they buy.

Much of the information in Gup's extremely readable 277-page book will be well known to anyone with sufficient interest to want to read at length about the topic. The story of once respected New York Times reporter Judith Miller being used as a shill by the Bush administration to sound the alarm about (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been thoroughly documented. Serious news readers will probably also be familiar with the cases of whistleblowers Sibel Edmonds and Bunnatine Greenhouse, both punished for their attempts to hold their respective organizations accountable for lapses, the former for revealing problems in the FBI's translators program, the latter for exposing irregularities and potential wholesale fraud in contracts awarded to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers.

What Gup does is take these and less high-profile stories and tie them together to form a narrative about the toll that a mania for secrecy is taking on our democracy and our lives. He devotes three of his eight sections to government, with heavy emphasis on the pathologically furtive CIA, to talk about how the metastasizing of information declared off-limits to the public mostly conceals information that is embarrassing or inconvenient to those in authority. He says the process has the effect of blurring what truly needs to be "classified" and making officials more careless about the handling of classified information, due to its unwieldy volume.

Gup also devotes chapters to a similar trend in the courts and at universities and colleges, and the impact that has on the public. And although he doesn't devote a full chapter to it, he refers as well to corporate secrecy and its connection to government as regulation has waned and the two have become more and more entwined. And he reports how the persecution of whistleblowers has been stepped up in an attempt to maintain the culture of secrecy in all these institutions.

His longest single chapter, unsurprisingly, deals with the impact of secrecy on the media. He unsparingly depicts a media caught between a rock and a hard place, making deals with the devil in its struggle to cope with a government that uses secrecy to keep it from accessing what should be public information and then binding it to secrecy with "unnamed sources" when it wants to use the media to get its message out. The media finds itself fighting secrecy to try to get information but demanding it to protect its own sources, who increasingly ask to be "unnamed" for flimsy reasons. In perhaps the book's most ludicrous example of the penchant for secrecy, he talks about the media's complicity with government in concealing the surname of one "Jose," who heads the National Clandestine Service, a bureaucratic job in which he oversees thousands of DC desk jockeys who presumably all know his name. Says Gup, "Any schoolchild can search the Web and unmask him without resorting to anything more complicated than Googling "Jose' and "National Clandestine Service.'" As Gup points out, this silly charade serves no purpose other than to win brownie points with government officials in the vain hope that they will be more forthcoming, in the process compromising the media in the eyes of an increasingly distrustful public. And, says Gup, that's when the proponents of secrecy win.