Ok, here's an experiment for you. Why don't you broadcast every single detail of your life, every minute of it, even the parts you don't want others to see? If you don't, you must be hiding something and be committing crimes against humanity. This is how your argument reads.

You've cut out an important bit: I am not governing anyone, nor do I hold the right to murder other human beings without repercussion.

We don't know that. All we know is that you're keeping secrets.

Right now, I'm openly sharing something.

But you give us no proof of what you are saying.

We need a trusted entity to check what you are saying is true.

So how about a mother then, raising her child and pregnant with a second. Should she have to reveal every single detail about her life while she has parental custody?

I read the parent comment's argument as suggesting that secrets should be inversely proportional to power.

What about government commercial negotiation information, surely the government can (should!) keep that secret at least until the negotiations are over, otherwise every single purchase made will have them ripped off due to information asymmetry.

Troop locations are another one. If you know exactly where everything is it gives you a huge advantage, and to a lesser extent where they've been.

Surely there are some secrets we can acknowledge the government can keep, for a time. The problem only arises when the executive branch abuse the classification system and label embarassing, non-sensitive (to the country, maybe not to their reelection) information as sensitive information.

In all honesty, I am an Open Government proponent, which means that I think the justice and pressure of having the entire society able to monitor the situation will self-heal any attempts at exploitation. It is only because you don't know how much the Government pays for things, that it is able to put you into debt so it can pay for the things it 'thinks it wants'.

Turn the light on the whole thing; make all procurement open to the public, simply put a 24/7 webcam on anyone who is functioning in a government role, and let it work. Open communication is the only thing that has truly propelled the species forward .. and yes I acknowledge it is 'a radical position' with fatal flaws, but alas ones viewpoint doesn't always have to be .. Right .. now, when discussing the nature of our abundant universe..

While i harbour no affection for the American Govt, but you seem to be targeting it a lot for having secrets. From what everyone understands from your comments is that there shouldn't be secrets. A secret = hidden crime. Well the irony here is that, this is EXACTLY how the NSA seems to be functioning. It doesn't want anyone to have any secrets from it. Because it assumes, like you, secret = (possibility of) hidden crime. In fact the NSA can argue, just like you, we uncovered secrets of people, it turned out they were criminals. Hence no one should be allowed to have any secrets. See what's wrong with the picture?

Now, I assume everyone here is mature enough to understand the distinction of things that should be kept secret and which not, and i shouldn't be wasting anyone's time (including mine) into giving an explanation of what matters require secrecy, and in what cases certain secret things should be made public

You have blinded yourself in your understanding of a "secret" to those that have gotten coverage. And of course those secrets have been damaging and damning. Otherwise, the personal risk of exposing them is not worth the reward. And even if it was, the media would find little interest in covering them.

> I do not actually consider a society with any investment in state secrecy to be actually functioning.

Either everyone gets to know the President's credit card number or it's tyranny?

I don't necessarily agree with the thesis of the post you're responding to, but your example is personal privacy on the part of someone who happens to hold office, not a state secret.

Yeah, that was sort of intentional, I'm suggesting that distinction doesn't actually get us very far as it might seem at first glance.

For instance, there's probably a billing account or two assigned to just the office. That wouldn't be personal, but wouldn't be something the state just passes around either.

You could retort that's still not "state secrety" enough. We could then exhaustively try to separate the sheep from the goats, but it's probably just a definitional minefield.

We can probably skip all that and agree on the broader point, though: absolutisms aren't very useful here. They're seductive because of their intellectual purity. But despite our best intentions, we're inevitably going to end up haggling over what's a good secret or bad.

Probably many people will have different opinions on that question that are all prima facie reasonable, but that's ok, just so long as we avoid adopting an all or nothing approach because it seems easier.

The office billing account is a much better example. It is a secret that is legitimately preserved by the state, without there being room for corruption (if we publish the transaction history) that wouldn't be present anyway if the secret were disclosed.