Most Americans are not old enough to remember the ongoing, intense controversy over what happened to 18 1/2 minutes of tapes secretly recorded in then-President Richard Nixon’s office in 1972. Though no one knew what the erased part of hundreds of hours of tapes contained, Nixon was under fire because of the Watergate Scandal – and many people wondered if the erasure was an attempt to cover something up.

Likewise, when then-President Ronald Reagan said, in answer to some questions about the Iran-Contra scandal during the mid-1980s, that he didn’t recall, many people assumed he withheld the information on purpose.

Government secrecy has grown to a level that would astound Nixon.

Details of what may be the single most massive personal refusal to come clean with the public are still coming out. But we know that during her four years as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton broke laws on treatment of official communications.

Required by law to use a government email service for official purposes, Clinton had a private computer server installed at her home. She used a personal email account for about 60,000 communications while secretary of state.

Now, Clinton says about 30,000 of her emails will not be turned over to the State Department. She insists we take her word for it that the messages were purely personal.

On an institutional basis, the State Department may win the prize for secrecy. The agency’s inspector general reported this week that in 2011, while Clinton was secretary, State Department employees handled more than a billion emails.

Of that number, just 61,156 were preserved as part of the public record. That is six one-thousandths of 1 percent of the total.

It is getting worse, not better. In 2013, State Department employees preserved just 41,749 emails.

No doubt other agencies, including many that have nothing whatever to do with national security, also are wiping out emails they would rather the public not see instead of complying with the law on preserving them.

Some government documents do need to be kept classified, of course. The government has specific criteria for that.

But it is clear the vast majority of decisions to keep Americans in the dark are being made by individual government employees who have vested interests in secrecy.

Where is the outrage? Not in the White House, which should be enforcing federal transparency laws. And usually, not in Congress, unless some specific investigation is going on.

This is not government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is government behind the people’s backs – and it is dangerous, as history should have taught Americans. What we don’t know can be bad for us.