Impediments to freedom of information

Being against secrecy and for greater freedom of scientific and technical information is like being against evil and for motherhood. And, while I believe that we must be ever alert to the possibility of suppressed information, I do not believe that this is as serious a problem today as it once was. At the very least I would seriously doubt if you will find many proponents of secrecy among scientists and engineers, and certainly not among politicians. What we probably should be looking for are the impediments to the transfer of knowledge from the experimenter or conceiver to the user. While secrecy is certainly one such impediment, I do not think this is the central problem.