At work, at the doctor’s office, on campus, in your car, your right to know has been replaced by someone else’s right to keep a secret.

U.S. judges allow businesses to make secret settlement agreements that keep products with life-threatening defects on the market. Intelligence agencies use an ever-widening array of classification schemes as weapons in their turf wars with rival bureaucracies. Universities use obscure readings of federal statutes to keep victims of rape and assault from learning how their attackers were punished. The press offers anonymity to its government contacts, freeing them from accountability, robbing readers of transparency, and, sometimes, shattering innocent people’s lives. And whistle-blowers who dare to expose some of the worst excesses that secrecy permits are afforded less and less protection.

In Nation of Secrets, Ted Gup identifies a malignant strain in American culture, exposing how and why our most important institutions increasingly keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve. Drawing on his decades as an investigative reporter, Gup argues that a preoccupation with secrets has undermined the very values—security, patriotism, privacy, the national interest—in whose name secrecy is so often invoked.

Gup shows how the expanding thicket of classified information leads to the devaluation of the secrets we most need to keep, and argues that journalists have become pawns in the government’s internal conflicts over access to information. He explores the blatant exploitation of privacy and confidentiality in academia, business, and the courts, and concludes that in case after case, th...