If public release of this information is damaging to US interest, the answer should not be to suppress this information, but rather to behave in an agreeable way in the first place.
I think the issue is more nuanced than it first seems to most people.
So, yes. I do say that governments should have no secrets.
Edit: Hell, let's just take this at the lowest levels, too: this kind of policy means everyone's medical and tax records become public, there would be no Witness Protection Program, and routine criminal justice might end up being impossible.
Let's not even go into the fact that this would prevent the government from using RSA, even for benign purposes such as authentication or something.
Missile launch codes?
People are really laying into wikileaks. Do not forget that they are just the messenger. A near boy has been held without trail for 8 months I think now, and for what? To risk his life by highlighting fraud and corruption, only for people to be still to stupid or too embedded in the system to realise. If Wikileaks had a cache of embarrassing Chinese data, you wouldn't be able to hear anything above the "Amerkah Fuckyeah". You live in a democractic society (probably), enjoy the freedom of information, then realise you actually live in a kleptocracy and the US is a pathological state.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable...
Talk about forcing a response.
You're petitio principii is showing please put some pants on.
Shouting "this can be nothing but a good thing" [wake up sheeple!] and claiming that this is blatantly obvious to anyone of modest intelligence doesn't make it true. Only if it's an obvious answer and I were reacting to that would it make this "meta-contrarian".
>There's the launch code; what use is it to you?
With no secrets I know where the bases are, all the computer schematics, all the cable connections whether or not remote launch is enabled, where to dig to jack into cables, which satellites to tap, what the guard rotations are on bases, what the secret service have found out about military personnel that foreign powers might use to blackmail them, etc., etc.. To me, now, those codes are useless - so is the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb though as I don't have the resources to act on it. There are plenty of people who do have the resources and who would be interested in holding America to ransom using their own nuclear arsenal.
IMO to consider that this sort of information isn't harmful to the security of a country is naive in the extreme.
Yes, if no one in the world were greedy or lusted for power then there would be no need for the final remaining human to keep secrets from himself.
How about a tamer example: if the government can't keep secrets then anyone can log in to Obama's email account and send an email that appears to be from him. Suddenly no government entity can be authenticated online. Iris scan, well yeah but the output of the scanner is public knowledge and the signing key is too.
At the very least I hope you can concede "well of course some secrets have to be allowed". Now define the boundaries.
To me, your response sounds like the knee-jerk reaction of a rebelling teenager. Do you think that Iran's closest neighbours want them to be invaded because they doubt that Iran will use nuclear weapons?
Your 100 informants getting murdered sits well with you? If it does it can only be because whilst you see that as saving thousands of Iranians you don't consider the billions that would most likely die if Iran initiate WWIII.
The world is not black and white. Unless it was physically impossible to keep secrets (which would likely mean zero privacy for any of the citizens, as well), people in power will keep secrets whether they are "official" or not. You will still never know about what you don't know about.
Of course some things need to be secret for practical reasons. The problem here would be secret nuclear weapons (Israel) not the codes that protect them from misuse.
None?
Seriously?
Think about this:
Let's say we gave the government permission to keep EXACTLY ONE secret. They could change their mind about what that one thing is at anytime. In order for them to choose a new secret, all things must be kept secret by default (otherwise, the Streisand Effect holds). A grace period must be allowed for the government to review the new things before deciding whether they want to publish that new information or change their choice of one secret, publishing the old secret.
Since everything is secret by default, they could just not tell us about the new information. They could cheat to keep TWO secrets. If one secret leaked, they could easily say "Oh well, that was our one secret! Damn." and we'd have no way to prove that they weren't keeping another secret.
The only way to prevent bad secrets is to disallow all secrets. We must systematically uncover sources of secrets and shine a spotlight on them. In the event that a secret is uncovered, there must be immediate and stern repercussions.
There is no way to prevent bad secrets. Bad secrets will remain secret as long as everyone who knows about them is dedicated to keeping them secret, regardless of what's legal or required, or what sort of repercussions you threaten.
I'll go along with this IMHO naive utopian view, but you're still forgetting that holding the US government to a no-secrets rule means the USA has no secrets while everyone else does. This sounds like a real winning combination for becoming the world's greatest defenseless sitting duck.
I remember Fareed Zakaria talking about how transparency hurts good governance - basically using a tyranny of the majority / anti-democratic type of argument. I think the example of ancient Greece having more war under democracy than "tyranny".
However, if everyone did see all the info we had on us, and the dirt on everyone else as well, perhaps it would lead to more outrage universally / less war. Then again, there'd be ALOT more gov't PsyOps going on to decisive the public.
Then you won't have any leaks. Problem solved!
Of course, you won't have any information other than what the government tells you, but them's the breaks...
However, the government needs to spend its resources keeping the "real/important" secret stuff under-wraps and opening up the rest(via low-level leaks).
A system like I proposed would lead to a better allocation of intelligence/security resources by the government and increased transparency for us - without removing all barriers to secrecy, which is highly unrealistic.
It's much safer IMO to have blanket protection for leaking/whistleblowing.
A similar thing happens with FOI requests here in Australia - there's an exemption for material which is 'commercial in-confidence'. Now pretty much everything that the government produces is marked as commercial in-confidence, and it's back to the old system of suing the government to release information.
Far better to have people leak stuff and then be protected under whistleblower / freedom of the press laws if it's in the public interest (with presumption that it is in the public interest, so the government has to bring a case to prove that it's not).
That's a lot closer to the truth than governments having no secrets.. yes, there's probably at least 1 secret worth keeping at any given time, but don't keep your mind so open that your brain falls out :) We're talking degrees, here.