{"id":46723,"date":"2022-02-15T18:18:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T23:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aclu.org\/issues\/secrecy"},"modified":"2025-06-17T16:40:21","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T20:40:21","slug":"secrecy","status":"publish","type":"issue","link":"https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/issues\/national-security\/secrecy","title":{"rendered":"Secrecy"},"parent":46591,"menu_order":4,"template":"","class_list":["post-46723","issue","type-issue","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"featured-image":210791,"intro":"The ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.","what-you-need-to-know":null,"promo":{"description":"","button":"","url":""},"faq":{"description":"","faq-items":null},"featured-stories":null,"latest-stories":null,"whats-at-stake":{"title":"What's at Stake","description":"Government secrecy is at odds with basic democratic principles. As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in 1936, \u201can informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.\u201d\r\n\r\nYet today, much of our government\u2019s business is conducted in secret. There are a multitude of secret agencies, secret committees of Congress, a secret court, and even secret laws. This sprawling\u2014and growing\u2014secret establishment presents an active threat to individual liberty and undermines the very notion of government of, by, and for the people.\r\n\r\nNowhere is government secrecy more out of control than in the national security context. For almost a decade, the American public has been told time and time again that some of our government\u2019s most controversial national security policies and programs are \u201csecret.\u201d The government has tried to keep us in the dark about the fact that it was secretly spying on all Americans, secretly torturing people, and secretly killing its own citizens on the basis of its secret interpretations of the law.\r\n\r\nThe ACLU fights for a democracy that is accountable to the public, the courts, and Congress. Secrecy endangers us all, eroding the checks and balances that a healthy democracy requires. As the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit put it in an ACLU challenge to secret court hearings, \u201cDemocracies die behind closed doors.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe ACLU regularly files Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits to challenge government secrecy around some of the most important national security questions of our time. A few notable examples include lawsuits:\r\n