> Simply because everyone thinks it's OK for governments to deal in secrets makes it OK. Noöne seems willing to conceive of a system where secrets are the excep

> Simply because everyone thinks it's OK for governments to deal in secrets makes it OK. Noöne seems willing to conceive of a system where secrets are the exceptional, special case and not the norm. This is frankly confirmation bias. Secrets are the exception in our government, and in most governments, because they are by nature public entities. It's just that you place very little value on the other information out there (and so does the government, and so do other governments, which is why they're not secret in the first place). The topic of these conversations starts out with the presumption that the secrets are the important bits to discuss. That makes it incredibly difficult to recognize the presence of other pieces of information right in front of your eyes, because it looks like background noise. Unlike mr_luc, I do have a solution, but it's not a politically feasible one: a world government. There's a quibble there about the need for things like wiretaps for law enforcement, but I'd be willing to bet that it's a lot less necessary to have operational security even for things like that.