What he was trying to get at is, how does a democracy function properly when it has no idea what it's leadership is doing, because the leadership makes everything secret and classified? It's a good question and I don't really have an answer.

I'm not sure I accept the metaphor - visibility is not participation. Too-large meetings are useless because they have too many participants, and everything falls to bike-shedding. Plenty of organizations, from public companies to the Federal Reserve, get things done with visible meetings where interested parties can't speak but do see the minutes. In my version of the metaphor, non-secrecy is totally consistent with small-meeting democracy: we elect people to go and represent us, but demand information about how they did so in order to hold them accountable. (If Congress voted by secret ballot, do you think it would represent us better or worse?)

(The question of information which is harmful to share is a fundamentally different one than a general argument for privacy, and a much harder one. Those cases are real, but it's also true that there's a long track record of government claiming information is harmful to release when it's actually embarrassing or unethical.)

> If we dont trust who we elect to office then thats a seperate issue that we need to tackle on its own.

Great, we haven't tackled it, and without clear information about what officials do it's not clear how we can.

There's never been an era of declassification and leaks where we looked around and said "yep, everything in there looks like it was done in good faith". I'll embrace an end to leaks around the same time they stop containing evidence government bodies knowingly classifying horrible misdeeds.

Hell, I'd even settle for "no war crimes lately", but we haven't managed that yet.

I was about to reply with exactly this point. Transparency does not entail everyone gets their say, merely that the factors and interests considered in a decision are ultimately disclosed with no secrecy. Then perhaps there can be a public commentary period before proceeding so there is some participation, but participation at every step isn't necessary for engendering trust via transparency.

This obviously gets trickier on national security matters, but the judiciary is supposed to judge what is and isn't too sensitive here. Secret court proceedings are skirting dangerously close to crossing that line though.

No, this is not a universal absolute truth.

It's not an easy problem to solve.

Leakers are one way we can learn how the sausage is really made, and in most cases that knowledge is in the public interest.

Perhaps, if you implicitly trust the government