Politics: Secrets

When it comes to the government and secrets, I'm of the "You show me yours and I'll show you mine" philosophy. It's not really reciprocal when our secrets, whatever they may be (For example, I might tell someone over the phone, in confidence, that I don't care for macaroni and cheese or baseball - they would retort that such a stance is quite unAmerican, and now the NSA knows the whole thing), are plucked from our fingers, while the government decides to classify and reclasssify more data, claim state's secrets exceptions, etc. It's not really fair.

Seriously, the point of the War on Terrorism is, ostensibly, to protect the American people, not America or the American government. There is a difference. But if the American people become less and less informed about the American government, that government becomes a large "unknown unknown", that is, a larger potentiality for threat vectors. Anyone who dismisses the idea that a government could be a threat to their own citizens apparently has forgotten the stories with which we were inculcated during the Cold War (and countless other periods of history).

The less the government allows any group to know about it, the more we have to assume that it represents a threat to one or more of those groups. And unless it can provide some proof beyond vague assurance that the groups of which I am a member are not those under threat, well, then I have to feel threatened.