Physicist Edward Teller once said, "Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction." A high-ranking government official said, "When you give a small boy a hammer, there isn't much that doesn't need pounding…. If you are in a culture of creating secrets, you will advance accordingly."

The problem of living in a culture of secrecy is that "secrecy" loses all meaning. Those in charge of keeping secrets get confused over exactly what's worth keeping secret - since everything's "Secret." What results are lax attitudes and whistleblowers who let the public in on 'the news" anyway. Just recall the most "classified" stories (Enron, Hewlett Packard, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Valerie Plame, Halliburton, etc.) and the point's made.

It presents a dilemma. The Bush administration used 9/11 to create a paranoia, making declassification of any sort of secrets "suspect." And to cement this paranoia, the administration said the "war on terror" will be "without end." That means censorship, executive privilege (called the "unitary executive doctrine"), and outright refusal to even "show up" at hearings are to be considered permanent executive responses.

"Transparency" is now an artifact, a luxury that the world can no longer afford.

Bush uses as his rationale the possibility of another attack and the fear that "everything" is a potential target. That means everything public and private is now dragooned into the war against terror - "deputized" as it were - and expected to cooperate. "Security" has spread across the spectrum of civilian life, elevating even the most quotidian details (blueprints for a bridge, disposition of waste, one's private records) into the realm of "sensitive" information.

Once upon a time, before Bush, public knowledge was considered a strength of democracy, a chief corrective on corruption. Thoreau said "Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect," Madison warned of "gradual and silent encroachments," and Patrick Henry said "The liberties of people never … will be secure when the transactions of their rulers [are] concealed from them."

Today, there's near contempt for openness. If someone "leaks" something, there is an attitude that he is betraying the nation. Whistleblowers face serious retribution. And when corruption is exposed in government or corporations, instead of punishing the guilty, the government (or corporation) launches a criminal investigation to hunt down the person who leaked the story. The burden of proof is actually on the good guys (who become fall guys) and not on the government or the most corrupted CEOs.

The irony here is quasi-prophetic. First, there was the rush to classify information, which rendered those needing information for national security unable to do their jobs. Even Congress couldn't make intelligent decisions. Second, with virtually everything "secret" (even information about secret information) the word "Secret" has lost its cachet and is met with growing indifference, the same indifference that is given to "unclassified" information.

The new secrecy means the right people don't get the information they need because of restrictions at the most absurd levels, and the wrong people get information because nobody knows what's really secret anymore. As one journalist said of the Pentagon, "the one secret they would least like to have exposed is how few truly valuable … secrets they possess."

What has been lost in this paranoia is intelligent transparency. Just another piece of what needs correcting in the aftermath of Bush.