Following the Watergate crisis, Congress passed “sunshine” laws intended to open up government to inspection. The results of these laws, as detailed by Jason Ross Arnold in Secrecy in the Sunshine Era: The Promise and Failures of U.S. Open Government Laws, suggest less sun, but rather heavy clouds with a veritable chance of showers. Even after passing laws specifically designed to allow access, the ensuing years have witnessed citizen groups, the media, and even politicians openly complaining about a lack of access to important information. After 9/11, these complaints became particularly salient as the Bush Administration was viewed as operating the War on Terror in near-secrecy and without oversight. When the Obama Administration came to office, they promised the American people “the most transparent administration in history (Chapter 10),” but the results have thus far showed that Obama has delivered anything but.

Recent salient scandals show how secrecy is often intertwined in politics: Did the Obama Administration knowingly mislead the American people about the Benghazi attacks in order to win reelection? Did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton use improper email accounts for secure communications, and did she attempt to destroy evidence of such? Did the IRS purposely destroy email communications about their targeting of conservative groups? These questions are tough to answer one way or the other, because the government often finds ways to shade itself from the sun’s disinfecting rays. If there was ever a time for a comprehensive study of the government’s attempts to hide from public scrutiny, this is it.

Arguments about government secrecy often tend to be unprincipled and poorly thought out: Every sane person acknowledges that some amount of secrecy is necessary to effectively run a government. At one extreme, we should not want nuclear launch codes to be publicly available. At the other extreme, we should not want a government that can wantonly hide its potentially malicious activities from public scrutiny. But just where is that happy medium? This is where Arnold begins his investigation.

In Chapter 2, Arnold parses out the various reasons both for openness and for secrecy. The reasons for openness are that (1) it allows the citizenry to make informed choices and hold leaders accountable for their actions, (2) it allows inter-branch checks and balances to operate effectively, (3) it encourages trust in government, (4) it eliminates the corrosive effects that excessive secrecy has on public servants, and (5) it allows decisions to be made by more sets of eyes and with more input. The positive reasons for secrecy are that it allows (1) for energy in the development and execution of laws, (2) checks and balances to operate properly, and (3) it protects public safety.

However, as Arnold points out throughout his historical examinations, there are many reasons that presidents, for example, use secrecy that are not so positive: to cover-up mistakes, to hide entanglements with interests, and sometimes to do illicit things. Of course, administrations rarely admit to hiding information for such malevolent purposes; they instead tend to justify their secrecy as, for example, necessary for national security or safety or essential to the system of checks and balances.

Unlike many popular accounts of secret keeping, Arnold is careful to provide a nonpartisan view of how different administrations keep secrets despite laws that supposedly demand transparency. This aspect of the work is particularly refreshing given the degree to which those who were vocal proponents of transparency during the Bush administration have become mute since the election of Barack Obama.

Chapters 3 through 10 provide a richly detailed analysis of how administrations since the 1970s have attempted to subvert the laws intended to provide transparency. The conclusion of this painstaking analysis is that all administrations take steps to hide information that should—under the intent of sunshine laws—be readily available. Arnold cites a few reasons that administrations attempt to subvert sunshine laws: For example, it might be in line with their governing strategy or it might be a product of the circumstances administrations find themselves in (i.e. the aftermath of 9/11).

The episodes provided by Arnold show the lengths and ways that administrations attempt to subvert sunshine laws are sometimes funny, but often disturbing. Administrations have a great deal of discretion when it comes to releasing information, so if there is something an administration does not want known, there are mechanisms in place that can prevent it from coming out. And even when an administration is forced to turn something over, it often does so in a way that obfuscates (i.e. giant document dumps right before Christmas) (p. 374).

The analysis of the work is mainly historical. While Arnold does attempt to identify the causal mechanisms behind each administration’s actions, it is not clear that there is much that can be generalized from the accounts (other than that obfuscation is likely to continue when it serves an administration’s purposes). The forces that seem to drive secrecy vary from president to president, and time period to time period. In this way, this work could serve a great background material for those interested in performing more systematic analysis.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in government accountability. Arnold has done a great job of collecting complicated and sometimes obscure histories; this work would be an excellent starting point for anyone interested in government accountability. It is written in a way that makes it accessible to most audiences; however, the book’s length may make it a heavy task for those interested in more condensed accounts. While the book is likely to be generally depressing for those who believe in government accountability, there are bits of comedy—for example, it is ironic that President Obama accepted an award for transparency from behind closed doors (p. 334).