open secret

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An open secret is a concept or idea (often in, but not necessarily limited to, government and military circles) that is "officially" secret or restricted in knowledge, but is actually widely known; or refers to something which is widely known to be true, but which none of the people most intimately concerned is willing to categorically acknowledge in public.

Examples of military open secrets:

• Area 51
• Delta Force
• DEVGRU
• Nuclear weapons and Israel
• Numbers stations
• SOSUS (Declassified, 1991)
• ECHELON
• Electromagnetic bomb
• DARPA (US military security system)

Other open secrets:

• Codex Alimentarius (Food laws)

The BT Tower in London, despite being a 177-metre (580 ft) tall structure in the middle of the city, was an official secret and did not appear on Ordnance Survey maps until it was officially revealed by Kate Hoey under parliamentary privilege in 1993.^[1]

An example of open secret in politics: it may be widely known that an individual government minister holds a particular opinion, but is at present unable to express that opinion publicly because it is contrary to the formally expressed view of the government of which he or she is a member.

The book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. includes the religion of Bokononism, outlawed in the fictional San Lorenzo. There are severe punishments for anyone found to be a practitioner of this religion. The open secret is that while everyone in San Lorenzo denies being a Bokononist, they all are. This includes even the dictator of the island, by whose command it was outlawed.

The term has also been applied to public knowledge of a person's sexual orientation. For example, the composer Benjamin Britten was homosexual, but never identified himself as such. Nevertheless, it was widely known and was thus an open secret.^[2]

In television, the primary real-world identity of The Stig, a costumed and masked television test-driver used by BBC Television was an open secret until the unofficial embargo was broken by a newspaper in 2009.^[3]

References

1. ^ Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1993-02-19, column 634
2. ^ Philip Brett, 'Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet', Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (London: Routledge, 1994), p18.
3. ^ Foster, Patrick (2009-01-19). "Identity of Top Gear's The Stig revealed as Ben Collins". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5548705.ece. Retrieved 2009-01-19. "The identity of the white-suited Stig ... has been an open secret within the motoring world for some years, with newspapers refraining from publishing his name, to uphold the spirit of the programme." 

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