BuzzFlash Reviews
Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (Hardcover)
Ted Gup
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Gup takes on government and the corporate world, "exposing how and why they keep secrets from the very people they are supposed to serve. Drawing on original reporting and startling analysis, 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 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 cour ts, and concludes that in case after case, these principles have been twisted to allow the emergence of a shadow system of justice, unaccountable to the public.
Drawing on Gup's decades of work as an investigative reporter, NATION OF SECRETS will shake our faith in some of our most trusted institutions, piercing the veil of secrecy to reveal an alarming new threat to democracy in America. Gup presents a vision radical in its clarity, conservative in its roots, of a country teetering on the brink of losing its identity."
Ted Gup, a former staff writer for the Washington Post and Time magazine, is the author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat To Democracy And The American Way Of Life, (Doubleday, June 2007) and The Book of Honor: Covert Lives And Classified Deaths At The CIA, (Doubleday, 2000, Anchor Paperback 2001) and is the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University.
He has also written for a wide range of other publications including Smithsonian, National Geographic, the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Slate, GQ, Mother Jones, the Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and Newsweek. He has been a Pulitzer finalist and the recipient of numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Gerald Loeb Award, and the Book-of-the-Year Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors (for The Book of Honor). He has been a Fulbright Scholar to China (1985-1986), a grantee of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a Fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow
From Booklist:
Investigative reporter Gup examines the increasing obsession with secrecy in the U.S., its causes, and risks associated with this trend. Gup notes an increasing secrecy in laws and practices within the various branches of government. The response has been fits and starts of efforts to ensure a more open government. Yet readers would be wrong to assume that the dangers perceived after 9/11 would be the primary impetus for this new wave of secrecy. Gup argues that technological advances just prior to 9/11 increased classified material fourfold.
He focuses primarily on the Bush administration's "war on terror" but also scrutinizes corporate America and universities, offering examples of subverted laws initially designed to protect the privacy interests of students. Gup also explores the dysfunctionality of overclassification of secrets and the debilitating impact it has had on both government agencies and the public. A most timely critique in this age of an endless and amorphous war on terror.
From Publishers Weekly:
In this probing exposé, former Washington Post and Time magazine investigative reporter Gup (The Book of Honor) surveys the post-9/11 mania for secrecy, focusing on the ubiquitous classification of routine information, the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act and the persecution of whistle-blowers. The government, he notes, is busy reclassifying information that has been in the public domain for decades, and a Pentagon report criticizing excessive secrecy was stamped Top Secret.
It's all part of a national obsession with confidentiality, Gup argues, that afflicts corporations, universities and the press itself, whose reliance on unnamed sources corrupts and misleads its reporting. Gup's muckraking sometimes misfires (he reports on an intelligence operative who either murdered two other agents or was pulling his leg), and he ups the anxiety by conflating government secrecy with surveillance and wire-tapping programs.
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