In the early nineteenth century, states, including Egypt, did not share basic details of how they functioned with people outside government. But a conception of a public “right to know”—about information as a public good—crystallized in Egypt in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. How did this happen and what were the consequences? The watershed 1896 trial of a low-ranking Cairo telegraph operator and a newspaper publisher offers a window onto changing public expectations of the state. It was the first time in Egypt someone was tried for leaking a telegram, in this case one reporting on the condition of the Egyptian army in Sudan. It was also the first time that the bounds of official secrecy were debated in public, in a courtroom where anyone could observe the proceedings. Shockingly, the defendants won. Yet their victory was a pyrrhic one, this paper argues, for it linked the growing nationalist movement to demands for wider circulation of government information. Within a decade, a string of violent confrontations between colonial and anticolonial actors had led to the legal fusion of policing deeds and policing ideas. Even as telegraph operators, journalists, lawyers, and activists challenged the bounds of public knowledge, however, who was counted as part of the public entitled to certain knowledge remained highly circumscribed. Class, gender, religion, and geography hang in the shadows of both the 1896 trial and the clashes over secrecy and transparency that followed. This paper offers a close reading of the 1896 trial through Egyptian newspapers with conflicting political orientations. Drawing on Ottoman and British archives, it also situates the trial and its afterlife in relation to the codification of state secrecy in Britain and the “fake news” panic that haunted Hamidian officials as the Ottoman Empire contracted.