WikiLeaks, Secrets, and Reality
The choice is between a world in which officials can share information and carry out reasoned debates with one another and a world in which nothing can be written down.
UCLA’s Mark Kleiman, hardly a knee-jerk reactionary, on WikiLeaks:
The notion that governments should have no secrets sounds attractive until you run the game back one step: if there can’t be any secrets, then you can’t write down anything you don’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. That’s a sure formula for making executive-branch deliberations as content-free as Congressional debates.
The choice is not between a world with secrets and a world in which all the citizens know whatever the government knows. The choice is between a world in which officials can share information and carry out reasoned debates with one another and a world in which nothing can be written down. Really, that’s a not a hard choice.
Preach it, brother.
So, if nothing can be written down, that includes laws, right? If that’s the case, then I am for it.
Matt, there’s already a magical land where all your dreams came true. It’s called Somalia.