While we'd prefer all secret sources to be noble whistleblowers, often they are not, and a reporter's handshake with them carries a stench.
The Independent newspaper has described it as a "delightful and worthwhile publications, more footnote than story, that delivers a comprehensive picture of a clandestine world which the Establishment would prefer remained secret".
Instead, a politician who shuns the spotlight and famously quipped he prefers "dark, secret rooms" will occupy the centre-stage in Ypres and in Brussels the following day.
Edgar Degas preferred the secret drama in the wings, and the mating rituals of dancers and their aristocratic admirers, to the performance onstage.
4. While Generation Y subscribed to everything social, Generation Z doesn't want to be tracked, preferring Snapchat, Secret, or Whisper to communicate.
Today's cars, for instance, are computers on wheels, whose inner workings car makers prefer to keep secret.
Part of the responsibility of our free press is to ferret out and expose information that government officials would prefer to keep secret when such secrecy is unwarranted".
To a British reporter, it is a given that a journalist's duty is to discover and make public the truth, even or particularly when it concerns matters that government officials might prefer to keep secret.
To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.
When the Houston Astros were hacked last year — resulting in the publication of internal discussions about potential trades, player performance, and other information that baseball teams prefer to keep secret — people generally imagined the perpetrator as some kind of tech-savvy outsider.
