I think it is deliberately emotive calling them "secret arrests".
Probably anyone with experience of life in a totalitarian police state would say that a secret arrest means someone simple disappears. Gun-toting men in plain clothes take someone off in the middle of the night, without explanation, or anyone being notified, or the person is picked up on the street. Word or rumour will filter out that the person is now serving a sentence in the gulag.
This proposal is for a press embargo on disclosure, isn't it, not that family and lawyers would not be told? So it's not really "secret"?
I agree it is a potentially dangerous thin end of a wedge however.
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