Secrecy
practice of hiding information or making it inaccessible; quality of such information
Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups who do not have the "need to know", perhaps while sharing it with other individuals. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret.
Secrecy is often controversial, depending on the content or nature of the secret, the group or people keeping the secret, and the motivation for secrecy.
Secrecy by government entities is often decried as excessive or in promotion of poor operation; excessive revelation of information on individuals can conflict with virtues of privacy and confidentiality. It is often contrasted with social transparency.
Secrecy can exist in a number of different ways: encoding or encryption (where mathematical and technical strategies are used to hide messages), true secrecy (where restrictions are put upon those who take part of the message, such as through government security classification) and obfuscation, where secrets are hidden in plain sight behind complex idiosyncratic language (jargon) or steganography.
Another classification proposed by Claude Shannon in 1948 reads that there are three systems of secrecy within communication:
Concealment systems, including such methods as invisible ink, concealing a message in a harmless text in a fake covering cryptogram, or other methods in which the existence of the message is concealed from the enemy.
Privacy systems, for example, voice inversion, is a special equipment required to recover the message.
"True" secrecy systems where the meaning of the message is concealed by the cypher, code, etc. Although, its existence is not hidden.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Secrecy” is practice of hiding information or making it inaccessible; quality of such information. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Secrecy, practice and hiding, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “practice of hiding information or making it inaccessible; quality of such information” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1503443. The Library of Congress control number is sh85119431. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Secrecy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.