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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.




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