The Secret of Secrets
The Secret of Secrets
The first thematic section gives an insight into the world of human secrets, both private and public, past and present. Confidentiality from the early childhood has obviously a mighty role in developing moral standards, social skills and more generally in “école des sentiments”, as it is revealed by the thoughts and confessions of some hundred Budapest children, representing three different age groups between 6 and 18. On the consecutive pages the reader can find relevant views of nine professional “secret-holders” (physician, psychotherapist, prosecutor, lawyer, teacher, journalist, documentary film-maker, Catholic priest and Lutheran prison pastor) on their legal, institutional and ethical problems raised by daily practice. The third part of the section contains studies and documents on secrecy from historical perspectives. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s study gives a summary of twentieth-century theoretical and legislative debates on governmental secrecy in the USA from President Wilson’s time to our days. Richard Gid Powers focuses on the public protest movement against governmental secrecy in the Cold War period. In order to show the persisting relevance of the problem, here we publish some findings and figures from the 1997 Congress Report on governmental secrecy. Finally, the Hungarian historian Tamás Meszerics discusses two “top secret” Cold War episodes of Western intelligence services: bugging the Soviet military cables by digging underground channels in Berlin and Vienna.