It isn't about having no secrets, it's about minimizing secrets. Which improves security, because secrets are a liability. They consume resources to keep and cause harm when revealed. The more of them you need the less secure you are. Government secrets are attack surface, not an unmitigated good.

If anything, the dynamics of the our "real world" show that we heading towards a future of either complete openness or unlimited state secrecy (with unlimited state secrecy sadly looking the likely winner).

Beyond the particular illegal (or simply immoral) activity revealed by Snowden's revelations, we see the ability of secret powers to extend themselves secretly and thus grow without being bounded by any democratic norms or public debate. And we see the scale of the state and the scale of technology as only accelerating this.

It seems that NSA hacks every single hackable subsystem of every electronic device out there, keeping the cleverest things things for national security (the ability to track cellphone location even with batteries removed was considered a crucial tool for drone-killing Taliban/Al Qaeda leaders, etc).

The existence of an intelligence agency's "crown jewels" implies that "parallel construction" must be used with the information that these "crown jewels" gather, in the fashion Alan Turing's crowd already only selectively using their interceptions against the NAZIs.

But here we see that what in the 1940s a small region of secrecy and control can be in 2016 a potentially limitless area where a military paradigm is mobilized against the individual and where institutions like the courts serve the military purpose of decoys and misdirections (with even the secret courts winding up manipulated through even-more-secret programs and methods, etc). A military facing an opposing state wants to find weapons that give its opponent no recourse - secretly the opponents plans being one a great instance of this. But the court system and the democratic requires real debate, a real fight of opposing positions and thus the reality of democracy and rule of law is progressively degraded.

The existence of the means of secrecy justifies their expansion (discussion of the "most important" secrets requires more secret action to stop said discuss, etc) and this expansion naturally must be secret. Clearly, this complex will either rise to omnipresence or come to an end as things go forward. Sadly, it's hard to see how it will come to an end.

Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries "minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the US abandoning secrecy.

>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29

I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.