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Since the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports about all sorts of other and , one might expect extensive coverage of its own “voluntary separation incentive program” recently offered (and then rescinded) to journalists at the state’s largest media organization.

But the Star-Advertiser issues related to the , which represents the company’s more-than-100 editorial employees. So, instead, we learned about these buyouts/layoffs and company demands through other media sources, such as , and Civil Beat.

Among the fascinating behind-the-scenes details revealed by Civil Beat’s Rui Kaneya was the pressuring of those editorial employees to sign nondisclosure agreements requiring “confidentiality” and “no disparagement” without even getting such terms clarified in writing for union attorneys to vet.

Such silencing tactics reflect a disturbing trend in the United States, in which corporations of all types have been trying to surreptitiously undermine constitutional rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. While nondisclosure and noncompete clauses in employment contracts have a limited place and purpose – when precious secrets are at stake, in highly technical fields – they should be rarely used and only in special cases.

This instead is being abused and expanded into all sorts of inappropriate places, including for , , , and .

A , released earlier this year, stated that 18 percent of the U.S. workforce now is under such speech restriction, which equates to about 30 million Americans trapped and censored in their jobs. They are kept this way often without any perceivable benefit, other than as a societal control mechanism to ensnare employees in their current positions.

In other words, scientists working on a nuclear submarine? Yes, those sorts of secrets should be kept as tightly as possible.

Sandwich engineers constructing a sub for my lunch? Those folks aren’t any sort of threat to national security (or the underpinnings of capitalism).

So most of those people – especially the roughly by such contracts who do not have college educations and make less than $40,000 per year – should be set free from such unreasonable restrictions on their rights to free speech, free expression and the freedom to pursue happiness.

Lawyers generally understand this situation. Ohio attorney Ronald L. Burdge, for example, noted in a 2012 article for the American Bar Association that  – hurt our country’s sense of fair and equal justice.

They also probably are not enforceable, in most cases, of illegal or unethical behavior. They really are created to scare and control people more than provide legal justification for lawsuits.

Nondisclosure and noncompete clauses in employment contracts should be rarely used and only in special cases.

These backroom deals almost never benefit the public but almost always benefit people trying to hide bad behavior. Corruption naturally gravitates to these sorts of dark places, which is why I strongly recommend shining a bright light on governmental affairs. That means both legally requiring transparency and openness, , but then also adequately funding oversight agencies that can assess the situations and apply significant penalties, if warranted, which we generally do not.

I also suggest that more of the public spotlight should be shone on business endeavors that benefit from public dollars (which is just about every business, since they all use publicly funded roads, bridges, water and sewer and are protected by publicly funded police officers and firefighters).

At social gatherings, I get regularly exposed to business people confiding in me stories about their company-sponsored boondoggles, corrupt internal business practices and ridiculous tax write-offs, often supported by corporate welfare policies.

If any number of these activities happened in one of our beleaguered public agencies, the story would be propelled as front-page news. But because businesses generally play by different rules and are shielded from public scrutiny – despite benefiting in many ways from the public investments in them – they centralize power and diminish democratic oversight.

Presidential nominee Donald Trump, as the Associated Press reported, now requires almost everyone involved in his businesses and campaign to sign such an agreement, from his . Yes, you read that right, the maker of his “Make America Great Again” hats had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, according to the report, also requires such agreements with her staff.

President Barack Obama, as part of his campaigning in 2008, promised to have one of the most open administrations in history. Instead, his .

With such context, I have a hard time imagining either changing that trajectory. Neither one seems to be much of a proponent of open government and both regularly show disdain for journalists trying to ask tough questions (although, in terms of lack of disclosure and disdain for journalists). In Trump’s case, about the fate of the First Amendment and the .

Therefore, I expect public disclosures to become even more opaque in both government and business – from the top down and then back up again – as a culture of “it’s none of your business because it’s our business” pervades our society in even more nefarious ways.

Along those lines, Steven Johnson wrote a history of innovation titled and, spoiler alert, it’s not from closed fascist regimes. and people with the mobility to come together and then spread apart and try their ideas against others in different places and different scenarios.

So who is going to stand up and fight this societal drift back into the dark ages? Really, only one group is positioned to do that: Your friends, the journalists!

Yet the leader of this occupational clan in Hawaii, the Star-Advertiser, ironically enough, has turned to nondisclosure when its business dealings are cast under the examination light. Instead of leading by example, offering explicit detail about the current situation and easy access to spokespeople, leaders of the organization have gone dark.

They could be focused upon prompting a community discussion about the  and the , which might even lead citizens to rally around the company. Instead, they are putting up a veil.

That approach is anti-journalistic, which, considering the stakes, is something worthy of talking much more about.