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Governments are a function of their laws. I'm not sure what you mean by, 'are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other'.

I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.

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Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule

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