Barack Obama campaigns on transparency and then presides over a security apparatus that reporters here call more closed than Nixon's. Al Jazeera's Empire counts more than 1,300 government surveillance and monitoring facilities across the United States and asks why so many of their programs stay classified. Director Oliver Stone and war correspondents Jeremy Scahill and Richard Rowley appear alongside Washington Post investigative reporter Dana Priest, author of Top Secret America, to trace how secrecy became an industry of its own. Attorney Michael Ratner, who represents Julian Assange, weighs in on what leaks like WikiLeaks actually expose, while internet scholar Evgeny Morozov questions whether more data collection makes anyone safer. Psychiatrist Justin Frank, who has profiled both Bush and Obama, offers a read on the personal psychology behind official secrecy. The film moves between these interviews to build a case that classified government, rather than protecting national security, tends to corrode both democratic accountability and the security it claims to serve.