Alasdair Roberts, associate professor of public administration, began studying government secrecy in 1997 at what he calls an "extraordinary moment in history:" a time when open government laws, modeled after the U.S. Freedom of Information Act of 1966, spread around the world at an unprecedented rate. To date, more than 60 countries have adopted right-to-information laws, and Roberts has traveled extensively—from his native Canada to Brazil, Switzerland, and India—to gauge the progress of this global movement.

But as Roberts makes clear in his new book, Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age (Cambridge), the last decade has not been a simple march toward transparency—especially in the years since the 9/11 attacks. "Outside the United States, especially before 2001, the story was all about the advance of openness," says Roberts, who has degrees in both law and public policy. "And then, after 2001, there has been a huge debate in the United States about government secrecy, which is pulling in the opposite direction."

In Blacked Out, Roberts analyzes the current Bush administration's "retreat from openness" and argues that it has been neither as effective nor as far-reaching as critics have suggested. Much more problematic, according to Roberts, is the fact that "the very structure of government is changing in ways that undermine transparency." He points to three key areas of change: privatization, which shifts government functions to private entities that may not be subject to the same disclosure laws; intelligence and police networks that have proliferated since 9/11 and, Roberts says, "share information in ways that make it more difficult to get information if you're on the outside"; and the rise of supranational institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and the European Union, that are "making policy decisions national governments used to make." In addition, Roberts describes how the digitization of government data can both empower seekers of information and make their task infinitely more complicated.

One measure of the evenhandedness of Roberts' analysis is that Blacked Out has been praised by both right-to-information advocates and by government insiders. Aryeh Neier of the Open Society Institute called the book a "fast-paced, well-informed, and engrossing account of the emergence of a worldwide movement to hold governments accountable," while former CIA lawyer Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker wrote (in I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society) that Blacked Out is a "tour de force . . . a book important for anyone concerned with the history and future challenges for government information access at a time of fundamental change."

In the summer of 2006 the Freedom of Information Act turned 40. Plus, Roberts notes that March 2007 is the 10th anniversary of another milestone in the open-government movement: the 1997 report by the U.S. Senate's Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, spearheaded by the late senator and Maxwell professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan went on to publish the best-selling book Secrecy, which Roberts calls "really prescient. He said that governments which are too secretive can shoot themselves in the foot. If you put too much emphasis on secrecy, you undermine your own ability to make intelligent policy decisions, which arguably is what happened before 9/11 and before the war in Iraq."

Perhaps the most troubling question raised by Roberts in Blacked Out is whether the American public, bombarded every day by information—trivial and vital; true, false, and in between—will pay sufficient attention to revelations about government to act on them. "You can see how in the rush of everyday life, it would be easy and convenient to say, 'This is too complicated. It's too hard. It's too confusing. I don't have time to delve into this and sort out what the facts are, and as a consequence I'm just going to check out,'" Roberts says. "That's an alarming prospect. If people get into that frame of mind, transparency is irrelevant.

                                                                                     —Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers