| Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner. How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents? A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed). In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust. Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive. Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen. It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability. |