An open secret is information that is widely known, but kept out of official speech or formal acknowledgement, so everyone “knows” while the institution pretends it does not. - wikipedia 
# Etymology and Related Idioms
The phrase “open secret” is an oxymoron, and English sources record it by the early 19th century, describing something “secret” that many people can learn or already know. - etymonline.com
A close cousin is the French idiom “secret de Polichinelle” (Punchinello’s secret), meaning a supposed secret that everybody knows. - wiktionary
# Technocracy In my own governance vocabulary, an open secret can also mean something that is not “widely known” in society, but is easy to join once you already have the breadcrumb. The canonical example is a regular meeting held in a café: it is physically open, not illegal, not hidden behind locks, but you have to know it exists because it is not advertised anywhere you could reasonably discover by search.
The discovery barrier matters more than the physical barrier. The meeting is “public” in the sense that anyone could walk in, but it is “secret” in the sense that only people with the pointer can find the right time and place.
This is where capability URIs fit. A capability URL is hard to guess, not indexed, and acts like an access token: whoever holds the link can reach the resource, and whoever does not cannot easily even discover it. It is not encryption by itself, but it is “security by unguessability” used as a social filter, and it produces open-secret dynamics: the event or document is available, yet not publicly searchable. - wikipedia
# Why Open Secrets Exist Open secrets are socially useful because they let groups coordinate without taking responsibility. They create plausible deniability, protect reputations, and avoid triggering formal obligations that would appear if someone said the quiet part out loud.
They also function as a boundary tool. Insiders learn the “real map” by whispers and links, while outsiders are forced to interact with the official fiction or simply remain unaware, which quietly sorts who is allowed to act with confidence and who must stay tentative.
# Open Secrets as a Corruption Opportunity Open secrets are corruption-friendly because they make power legible to insiders while keeping it safely unprovable in official channels. This is how you get systems where everyone in-the-know can see the pattern, but nobody can cite it, escalate it, or write it down without becoming the problem.
In that sense, open secrets rhyme with Beware the Leopard. The institution can always say “there was nothing hidden,” while designing discovery so that only the right people can realistically find it.
# What Literate Transparency Tries to Break Literate Transparency tries to break open-secret governance by forcing important rules and mechanisms into a shared, readable layer where the official story and the operational reality cannot quietly diverge. The goal is not to eliminate privacy or informal culture. The goal is to prevent the specific pattern where secrecy is used to shield power while still allowing insiders to coordinate as if nothing is hidden.