I used to handle very sensitive material inside the Pentagon and I remember signing confidentiality statements for three different governments while working with an arms inspection group in Europe in the late 80s. In many of those documents, the operative material (i.e., the clearances to proceed) was initialed on post-it notes or on lightweight tissue paper below the main documents. Even with e-mails, the go-aheads were often initialed without any kind of electronic trails. In Ireland, some ministers run around with rogue Blackberries, meaning their calendars and electronic communications won’t be archived for any purpose.

It will take years–perhaps two generations–for historians to accurately assess who knew what and who was the primary source for launching a war campaign or for turning policy. It will take that long to correlate high-quality primary material. And even then, some of the perishable Post-it notes and faded pencil-whipped initials will distort the truth.

In my opinion, transparency can be also a mean of control. Both for the puplic and the state!
Suppose there was instant reporting of the My Lai massacre? Or accurate reporting of the police reaction to many of the 60’s civil rights marches? Or Lincoln’s brutal repression of civil liberties in Baltimore at the start of the Civil War? Would that have changed history? I think so. Would it have been all for the good, that is debatable.

Suppose there was instant reporting of the My Lai massacre? Or accurate reporting of the police reaction to many of the 60’s civil rights marches? Or Lincoln’s brutal repression of civil liberties in Baltimore at the start of the Civil War? Would that have changed history? I think so. Would it have been all for the good, that is debatable.

War is ugly, and innocent folks get killed by all sides. Would better coverage, of the Afghan war, ‘Nam war, Civil war, helped us win? Or would it just inflame passions and shed heat but no light?

Bush (and even more so Cheney) did not create records that might damage them. He did not read papers, files and reports, but received oral briefings. Cheney went in person to the Pentagon and to Langley and sat down with the actual working level guys there. There is no record of what they spoke and certainly not if and how he influenced their work.

Die Visualisierung der Leitartikel, Wikileaks als erste staatenlose Nachrichtenorganisation und das Scheitern des Spiegel – eine Zusammenschau der besten (Blog-)Beiträge zur Veröffentlichung der “War Logs”…….

I wouldn’t, for example, expect Assange to leak about dodgy dealings within the Swedish Pirate Party when he might be wholly willing to take down a mainstream party.

In making your final argument:

“I don’t think this is an inexorable process of opening everything, of making no secret safe. As much as I advocate transparency, I don’t advocate that. But when you don’t know how many secrets there are, when there are too many secrets, then everything can be a leak — in Afghanistan or in the Gulf of Mexico. Unless government and business take on a credible and complete ethic of transparency, they will hand over the job of transparency to leakers and no secret is safe.”

I’m struck that there’s a fine line here called “trust”, and it’s not likely to be easily achieved regardless of what gov’t does. Look, who’s to decide which secrets should remain secrets? It’s happening now, you might feel that too much is being made secret but that notwithstanding, someone has made that judgment. Will you really *ever* trust gov’t and business’ take on transparency? I think of it a bit like loud people, when you remove the loudest fm the group you find out that someone else was also loud, just not as loud as the person you just expelled. Same w/secrets, everyone wants to know everything even if after knowing it they regret the disclosure. As soon as a new bar is set for what should remain secret, someone will leak it and half the people will wonder why it was ever a secret and the other half will be really pissed that the leak took place and feel that it jeopardized our national security.

This is probably a good topic to have a lot of discussion around because I feel that your initial premise is a tad naive in that it pretends that we will all agree on when something s/b a secret…w/o knowing what that something is (since it’s a secret . Having said all of this, I don’t disagree that the current level of secrecy has set dangerous precedents around the world and we’re not safer for them.

Also, we don’t live in a world w/o enemies. Mind you, I’m no warmonger (quite the opposite actually), but I’m struck by how we find a balance between disclosure to those who foot the bill for all of these activities, and those seek to destroy our way of life (which could use some changing anyway . One of the Wikileaks disclosures today was about a Reaper drone (66 ft wingspan…yikes!) and they lost temporary control over and then had to crash into a mountain. On the surface, not a big deal, but in the context of war, is it wise to let current and potential enemies know that our weapons have significant weaknesses that can be exploited? Discuss amongst yourselves…

So I guess there is still hope for leaks of unethical behavior even in the long run.

There is, of course, another way to prevent leaks of unethical behavior: Not to behave in an unethical way. But maybe that’s too much to ask

Imho, WikiLeaks is very close but still on the right side of the line. War is sponsored by taxes and affects real human lives like nothing else. So, why should be kept in secret?

In my opinion, transparency can be also a mean of control. Both for the puplic and the state.
But you´re right in saying that this is a crucial process. It is not only about the safety of people (like the whistleblowers on wikileaks) but also about trust and reputation. All three of them cannot be purchased with money. So transparency can also be very ruinous.
The trouble is: who should decide where to draw the line?

There’s adifference between secrets and cover-ups I think. The only reason those “secrets” could be covered up was he fact that means of communication could be controlled or were almost absent

There’s privacy and secrecy, and these are two entirely different matters. I don’t have to tell my bed-time secrets because those are private, but if I’m cheating and don’t tell my wife then that’s not privacy, it’s covering up something

Noblesse s’oblige, but so do secrets: “secrets s’obligent” could reveal why Obama is sticking to the crazy foreign policy of his predecessors

I say no to secrets unless…