[livueta]

> Also, though I understand there is disagreement about this, I think countries keep secrets for a reason and I consider it naive utopianism to expect everything to be brought into the open.

The article obliquely addresses this concern:

> Ronald Reagan’s executive secretary for the National Security Council, Rodney McDaniel, estimated that 90 percent of what was classified didn’t need to be. The head of the 9/11 commission put the number at 75 percent.

> This created a huge amount of tension between so-called “real secrets” — things that really should never be made public, like military positions and the designs of mass-destruction weapons — and things that are merely extremely embarrassing to people in power and should come out. The bombing of civilian targets in Iraq was one example. The mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was another.

While I'm sure that advocates of naively utopian absolute transparency do exist, a much stronger position is that perfectly legitimate reasons of security have been abused to protect bad actors in power. It's a lot easier to argue against leakers and for the necessity of classified information when the system for designating state secrets doesn't conspicuously lack integrity. Rather than "no secrets ever", the argument posits the necessity of leakers in an environment where the majority of secret info should not be secret.