Our friend Joe W. ("Chip") Pitts is tireless when it comes to standing up for the constitutional rights of Americans. He has written for us in the past, on the dangers of the USA Patriot Act and domestic-surveillance schemes dreamed up by the Pentagon. When he's not writing, Chip is busy as a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and a volunteer leader with Amnesty International, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and the ACLU, among other organizations.

espite the abuses it has engendered under a cloak of secrecy, the USA Patriot Act is being reauthorized by Congress. CNN was finally able to broadcast pictures of bodies recovered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but only after taking the Bush administration to court. And journalists are still barred from viewing the caskets of U.S. soldiers flown back from Iraq.

Democracy continues to take a backseat to secrecy as the Republicans in power have blocked investigations into everything from the full record of Judge John Roberts, to the circumstances surrounding the Downing Street memo, to the secret detention systems used in the "war on terror."

While government secrecy is hardly novel, the degree of secrecy routinely invoked by the Bush administration is cause for concern. Whether by removing information from our midst by classifying it, by refusing to declassify it, or by means of laws like the Patriot Act—secrecy threatens to upset the constitutional balance and fundamentally change our open government.

Secrecy extends back to the Republic's founding. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention kept secret their evolving work until the deliberations concluded. And the founders recognized the need for secrecy in conducting foreign affairs. But secrecy was the exception rather than the rule in the United States, until the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century created what the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called a "culture of secrecy."

Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall encouraged a gradual re-opening, as more declassified documents and openness mirrored the globalizing world's interaction and interdependency. George W. Bush reversed this trend when he became president. A new culture began to creep into the executive branch, one with an extreme emphasis on loyalty and the prevention of leaks (other than "permitted" leaks). Those drapes of secrecy came to envelop even more formerly open areas of government after the 9/11 attacks.

UNDER THE COVER OF 9/11—After the events of September 11, 2001, in rapid succession the administration reversed the Freedom of Information Act's presumption of openness (effectively closing many records); arrested and deported thousands using secret evidence and secret hearings; pushed through the Patriot Act, with its secret courts, secret searches, and gag orders; used secret and unchallengeable evidence to create several "no-fly" lists and blacklists; and drafted secret "Patriot II" legislation, a development that became public only when it was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity.

The White House has resisted what it sees as interference from the legislative and judicial branches of government, independent bodies like the 9/11 Commission, and even the press. The administration fought federal court decisions ordering that secret detainees' names be released; that hearings be open; and that a particular U.S. citizen, José Padilla, labeled as an "enemy combatant" and possible terrorist, be released or charged.

Since 9/11, thousands of previously public government web pages have been removed on national security grounds. The Homeland Security Act actually included a provision allowing corporations to shield "critical infrastructure" information from disclosure (and themselves from liability) by giving it to the government—effectively making private but accessible documents secret government documents.

Terrorists should not be given road maps to successful attacks, but many of these measures have denied Americans essential information relating to their health and safety.

While the government was hiding more of its own information, it was simultaneously sweeping up more previously private information on each American. The number of secret searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act dramatically increased under the Patriot Act. Such searches now, for the first time, exceed the number of wiretaps issued on probable cause of criminal activity.