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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions. Anything less is tyranny.

You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world.

My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

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>My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

You protect it by not picking fights and minding your own business.

Once again, this is a naive and idealistic viewpoint that doesn't have a place in real world governing. There is a reason why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms. Simply "minding your own business" only goes so far and isn't a fool-proof protection scheme.

Where did I mention closing military or intelligence? The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

>Where did I mention closing military or intelligence?

Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries "minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the US abandoning secrecy.

>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."

> why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29

I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.

Small imagination :)

Ahhhh, don't you love the smell of rancid corrupt realpolitik in the morning..,..,

That [ending state secrecy entirely] is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world.

If anything, the dynamics of the our "real world" show that we heading towards a future of either complete openness or unlimited state secrecy (with unlimited state secrecy sadly looking the likely winner).

Beyond the particular illegal (or simply immoral) activity revealed by Snowden's revelations, we see the ability of secret powers to extend themselves secretly and thus grow without being bounded by any democratic norms or public debate. And we see the scale of the state and the scale of technology as only accelerating this.

It seems that NSA hacks every single hackable subsystem of every electronic device out there, keeping the cleverest things things for national security (the ability to track cellphone location even with batteries removed was considered a crucial tool for drone-killing Taliban/Al Qaeda leaders, etc).

The existence of an intelligence agency's "crown jewels" implies that "parallel construction" must be used with the information that these "crown jewels" gather, in the fashion Alan Turing's crowd already only selectively using their interceptions against the NAZIs.

But here we see that what in the 1940s a small region of secrecy and control can be in 2016 a potentially limitless area where a military paradigm is mobilized against the individual and where institutions like the courts serve the military purpose of decoys and misdirections (with even the secret courts winding up manipulated through even-more-secret programs and methods, etc). A military facing an opposing state wants to find weapons that give its opponent no recourse - secretly the opponents plans being one a great instance of this. But the court system and the democratic requires real debate, a real fight of opposing positions and thus the reality of democracy and rule of law is progressively degraded.

The existence of the means of secrecy justifies their expansion (discussion of the "most important" secrets requires more secret action to stop said discuss, etc) and this expansion naturally must be secret. Clearly, this complex will either rise to omnipresence or come to an end as things go forward. Sadly, it's hard to see how it will come to an end.

> How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

It isn't about having no secrets, it's about minimizing secrets. Which improves security, because secrets are a liability. They consume resources to keep and cause harm when revealed. The more of them you need the less secure you are. Government secrets are attack surface, not an unmitigated good.

Do you think the government should release plans and schematics for nuclear and biological weapons?

Or maybe the IRS should release every tax return it has ever received?

Or in a time of war, we should announce where all of our troops are going in advance?

> Or maybe the IRS should release every tax return it has ever received?

That's not so bizarre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Finland#Publicity_...

> Even when information of earnings and the taxation procedure of individual persons and companies are not public, the amount of taxes carried for each person and company is public information. Tax Administration authority is required to submit information for free if request is targeted. Larger records are submitted for journalistic purposes. Capital income and earned income, are both public information, while taxation of dividends from unlisted limited company is not

Closer to home, I can see exactly how much property taxes each and every one of my neighbors pay:

https://www.acgov.org/ms/prop/index.aspx

The nuclear info should be secret because it protects us from our enemies. The info on population surveillance should be secret because? Oh wait, the government thinks we are the enemy...

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