[jacquesm]

Governments have to learn that obscurity is not the same as security just as much as the IT world had to come to terms with it.

You can't 'hide' stuff and assume that it won't come back to bite you any longer. So stuff that you could get away with and sweep under the rug in the past now has the nasty habit of surfacing.

Wikileaks does not threaten transparency at all, it - or its successor - will enable a society that will either simply act more responsible and will deal with living in this new nice glass house or there will be a series of scandals. The genie is as likely to go back in to the bottle as the file sharing one.

The public is getting a rare taste of what their government is up to and so far secret really does seem to equate with 'can't stand the light of day'.

If secret was only 'will hurt our society if known' then wikileaks wouldn't have a leg to stand on.