Hiding in Plain Sight - Suspicious Transparency and the Lessons of Literature

Transparency is widely hailed as a cure for distrust, yet it frequently breeds the very suspicion it promises to dispel. Starting from the Epstein files and "Trumparency," this paper shows how the rhetoric of full disclosure fuels conspiratorial doubt. Building on critical transparency studies, it explains why transparency and secrecy are intertwined, and why transparency discourse shares with conspiracy theory the premise of a hidden "backstage." Yet concealment does not necessarily imply withholding access: evidence can be fully displayed and still go unseen, more effectively than behind a locked door. Literature–and detective fiction in particular–knows this all too well. The paper turns to literary strategies for hiding "in plain sight," and, from Poe and Conan Doyle to Christie, Chesterton and Borges, proposes a typology of five: attention redirection, informational drowning, mimetic camouflage, inferential misleading, and contractual exploitation. Transposed to political communication, these strategies help identify how timing, document dumps, procedural routine, paltering, and performative claims of openness steer the public's attention away from what is truly consequential. The paper concludes with the White House's AI chatbot America.gov, where opacity arises from excessive disclosure, not from withholding.