The United States government excels at holding onto secrets with practiced tight lips. Government secrecy is growing, according to a comprehensive new study, and the quiet zone increasingly is located between the government and the country's own people.

Secrecy has people and government eyeing each other with suspicion, which is a lamentable state of affairs in what we regard as a free, democratic society.

A coalition of 67 organizations favoring openness studied the growth of government secrecy in the years up to 2006. The report, available for release on Sept. 1, didn't make the front pages of many newspapers - the Tribune included, on a newsy day.

If readers missed the story, here are a few sobering figures from the report as summarized by the Associated Press:

3 "From 2003-05, the FBI made 143,074 requests for telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and others to turn over data. … The requests came in the form of national security letters, which are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval. In 2000, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 such requests.

3 "Last year, the number of decisions to classify documents was 231,995. Though the figure was down from 258,633 in 2005, it was still significantly higher than before 2001.

3 "At the height of Cold War tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, the presidents used the state secrets privilege six times from 1953 to 1976, enabling the government to unilaterally withhold documents from the court system. Since 2001, it has been used 39 times."

Of course, mention of the year 2001 explains much, when 9/11 changed life in the United States.

There is good reason for confidentiality to further national security. There doubtless are some secrets that should be exactly that, for a time, certainly not forever.

Secrecy always is a matter of precarious balance, in individual, interpersonal and societal life. An ethicist, Sissela Bok, wrote that the freedom to decide what to keep secret is fundamentally human, but also "it risks damaging the judgment and character of those who exercise it, and conceals wrongdoing of every kind."

Our system demands an aggressive and vigilant Congress and a potent judiciary to hold the executive branch to a reasonable and justifiable level of secrecy.

If citizens want to penetrate the federal government's veil of secrecy, the Freedom of Information Act has existed for 40 years. While the number of requests for government disclosure has grown, so has the backlog.

Stinginess in turning loose of information is not new nor confined to the highest levels of government. When local bodies try to finesse a good set of North Dakota open records and open meeting laws, what's at work is the danger of wanting to keep matters quiet. When the state Health Department dispenses shreds of information about West Nile disease cases like the Delphi oracle, people's need for awareness on a serious public health issue needs to be considered, as well as patients' and families' understandable wishes not to be exposed to the idle curiosity of busybodies.

But no local or state entity could ever come close to having the immense power of secrecy that the U.S. government wields. It's a power that should be allowed to exist only in the minimum amount necessary to protect a free and honest society.