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The most thoroughgoing control of information is to be found in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union and China, where even weather reports can be highly classified by the government. But there is scarcely any shortage of dodging and hiding in the rest of the world. In the U.S., the concealment of information is carried out so routinely in so many pockets of society that he practice is accepted as part of the perennial social weather, hardly worth special attention. Americans indifferently shrug off he extreme privacy practiced by commerce, industry and finance; by professions like the clergy, law and medicine; by societies like the Ku Klux Klan and the Shriners. But they tend to sit up and take notice when secrecy of some sort erupts into drama and controversy: say, when a Congressman goes to jail because of the FBI'S Abscam investigation, or when a group of well-dressed Japanese businessmen get arrested and charged with stealing computer lore from IBM. Such episodes remind the public of how the clandestine pervades society. Day in and out, most people accept professional prudence—say, that of the fashion or auto industries—as just part of the passing lifescape. People enjoying Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Thomas' English Muffins give little mind to the fact that such products rely on legendary secret recipes that have been hoarded, perhaps, more closely than the H-bomb formula (which a number of amateurs have long since put together entirely from public sources).
Americans for the most part bridle at the concealment of information only when they catch government practicing too much of it. This response is easy to understand. Americans, after all, are early and often drilled in the creed that hidden government is anathema to democracy, and never mind that the U.S. Constitution was drafted in closed session. "Concealment is a species of misinformation," said George Washington, and U.S. political leaders ever since have publicly followed his cue. What they do out of the public gaze, however, is often quite different. That is hinted at by the fact that the classified federal documents in the National Archives run into hundreds of millions of pages. More than hints are available in histories of such disasters as the U.S. involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion (after which President John F. Kennedy complained to one editor that if the press had only exposed the invasion in advance, "you would have saved us from a colossal mistake"). Democratic government's capacity for byzantine deviousness is probably best told by that epochal best-teller, the Pentagon papers—that "hemorrhage" of classified matter, as Henry Kissinger ruefully called it—which dramatized, in 47 volumes, just how far a government could go in clandestine and illicit duplicity.