It might be a car that fits neatly into a backpack, a unicycle that folds up into a shrimp fork, or a solar-powered scooter. It could bring world peace, universal justice or a better cup of joe.

        Nobody knows. And that may be the biggest mystery of all: How has Ginger — the code name for a still-secret device that reportedly will change the world — managed to elude the prying eyes of a notoriously nosy public?

        Ginger, also known as IT, is the brainchild of renowned inventor Dean Kamen. A book proposal detailing his gizmo recently garnered $250,000 from the Harvard Business School Press — and yet everybody is still in the dark. Even after intense scrutiny from some of the best snoops around, Ginger is a mystery.

        And mystery loves company. Here are some more:

        • CBS deftly kept the lid on the winner of last year's Survivor until the final episode aired and has sworn the contestants in the sequel to privacy. Northern Kentucky's own Rodger Bingham is virtually on the air every week as CBS airs the tribe's latest challenges, but in reality, he's back at home in Crittenden, not talking about who won.

        • Many months passed before political columnist Joe Klein was outed as the author of Primary Colors, the 1996 best-selling novel he published under as “Anonymous.”

        • The Rev. Jesse Jackson fathered a daughter in an extramarital relationship, but for nearly two years, few people knew about it.

        What's going on? This is supposedly the age of total disclosure, when sophisticated technology has thrown open the doors to everything, dispensing with the notion of privacy as swiftly as a private detective can jimmy a lock. From spy satellites to security cameras, from the Internet to Imus in the Morning, the world is awash in new sources of information, in new ways to know more things than ever before.

        So keeping a secret is impossible.

        Except that it isn't.

        As has been dramatically demonstrated by Kamen's thingamajig, Richard Hatch's status as the Survivor winner and whoever has already won Survivor 2, secrets are alive and well, often thwarting the best efforts of gossip columnists and others to get to the bottom of them.

        Despite everything we're told about a world in which confidentiality is doomed, secrets continue to thrive. Eventually, of course, some are revealed: a Vassar College professor blew the whistle on Klein; Jackson chose to disclose his situation the day before a tabloid spilled the beans; and the nature of Kamen's device will eventually be revealed — when the book is published in 2002, if not before.

        But for a while, the world is kept in the dark. All we know about Ginger is that noted technology gurus such as Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs and Amazon.com whiz kid Jeff Bezos have called it revolutionary, and that it will, Kamen says, “profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide.” John Doerr, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has reportedly ponied up millions to underwrite its development.

        Yet no one outside that smattering of insiders knows what IT is, a fact that runs contrary to the idea secrets are an endangered species.

        What may enable some secrets to stay hidden is, ironically, the very characteristic that gives the information age its name: the fact that it's packed full of information. With so much stuff flying around, with so many facts spilling out of our TV sets and our computers, people may be tuning out a great deal of what they hear — information to which, in an earlier, simpler time, they would have paid closer attention.

        That theory makes sense to Troy Williams, president and chief executive officer of Questia (www.questia.com), an Internet company launched earlier this year after a two-year, $45 million development phase that was strictly hush-hush. For a monthly fee, Questia will supply 24/7 access to a digital archive of virtually all the works of the Western humanities canon.

        “We weren't out there talking about it, that's for sure,” said Williams. “Our employees signed non-disclosure agreements.”

        What helped keep Questia a secret was the sheer volume of information about the Internet and related technologies that swirl about the world, Williams said.

        “It's hard to get above the noise even if you want to,” he said. Secrets can stay secrets because few people have the time to pay attention to everything, to filter out the important from the irrelevant. Lots of genuinely significant secrets might sneak through while people are otherwise distracted by the flotsam and jetsam of a world brimming with information.

        One could also make the argument that the same techniques that make secrets tough to keep in the modern age simultaneously make secrets easier to keep: That is, technology aids in the maintenance of secrets as well as in their unmasking.

        The elaborate security precautions that attended Survivor, and that are now in place to protect Survivor: The Australian Outback, include devices such as infrared glasses worn by guards on horseback who patrol the show's remote location.

        A recent Time article detailed the steps taken to ensure a surprise ending for the first Survivor, a series that became a cultural touchstone as well as a ratings behemoth: planting phony “mistakes” on the show's official Internet Web site and releasing deliberately misleading photographs and video footage of the show's contestants. With Survivor and its sequels — a third and fourth version are on the drawing board — keeping the secret of who wins the game has become a game in itself.

        Don Foster, the English professor who fingered Klein as the author of Primary Colors, said he discovered that the nature of secrets hasn't changed much, despite all the newfangled ways of ferreting them out: We like to keep secrets. And we like to figure 'em out, too.

        “It was astonishing to me, the tremendous fascination with secrets,” said Foster, who chronicled his adventures as a literary sleuth in Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (Henry Holt).

        Foster was asked by New York magazine to apply his expertise to one of the biggest mysteries of the 1990s: Who wrote Primary Colors? He compared the syntax and word choice of the novel's author with that of several likely suspects suggested by the magazine.

        His verdict: Klein.

        Klein, however, initially denied authorship and kept the guessing game going, which also, not coincidentally, kept talk of the novel alive and sales robust.

        “You have the right to write anonymously,” said Foster, who was vindicated when Klein came clean. “But other people have the right to try to figure out your secret.”

        Some secrets, of course, are artificially induced, nudged along by canny public-relations campaigns. In 1980, it was well worth CBS' while to keep viewers off balance about the identity of J.R. Ewing's (Larry Hagman) assailant in Dallas. And when Seinfeld producers worked on the series finale that would air in 1998, they removed the studio audience for the shooting of the final scene and required actors and technical staff to sign confidentiality agreements. Almost as big a shock as the endings themselves was the fact that the secrets were kept.

        The surprise endings of well-known movies such as Psycho, The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense also were kept secret to a remarkable degree, given the propensity of some people to want to seem important by spoiling others' fun.

        What gives ceremonies such as the Academy Awards their kick is the element of surprise, an element that remains undiminished despite the good-natured annual attempts by film critics to predict the outcomes. When the Wall Street Journal attempted last year to poll academy voters and ascertain the winners before the ceremony, the outcry was swift and loud: Let the world enjoy its secrets.

        Beyond pop culture, historical events often are suffused with secrecy, from the development of the atomic bomb to the Allied invasion during World War II known as D-Day to the identity of Deep Throat, the informant who enabled Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to break the Watergate story that forced President Nixon's resignation. Some of these secrets were revealed; others, like Deep Throat, still are the subjects of speculation.

        The personal secrets of the famous continue to intrigue us, from the out-of-wedlock birth of actress Loretta Young's daughter by Clark Gable to the fate of a daughter born to Albert Einstein and his first wife before their marriage in 1903.

        A world without secrets would be a bleak world indeed, a world devoid of those exhilarating bits of surprise that make us sit up and say, “Really?” or “No way!”

        Even the Internet and its attendant swarm of technological marvels haven't managed to change this salient fact about a secret: It is still possible to keep one. Think about it: You have a few secrets, don't you? Of course you do.

        Tell us about them. We promise they won't leave the room. (Connie Chung, if you're reading this, please wink now.)

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