> having people roaming around the halls of a sensitive government institution

Depends on your views on right to rebel.

Right to rebel?

I'm not aware of that one.

I see, it is a philosophical right.

Whether you agree with them or not, it seems the U.S. founders tried to give us all these other rights we might need to avoid the violent one.

Why would it be of the interest of any US citizen for elected officials to have any "secret" ?

Full transparency should be paramount.

Secrets need to be kept in the intelligence world. It's naive to think we can be fully transparent on issues of methods and means. Congress needs to know things about our security apparatus but shouldn't be made public for obvious reasons.

The entire idea of a representative democracy is we elect people to act for us. That includes knowing information that shouldn't be public and making the correct decision for the country.

> The entire idea of a representative democracy is we elect people to act for us.

How do you keep elected representatives accountable then ? Their words alone is not worth the storage space it's being recorded on...

Congress constantly gets briefed on things that are behind closed doors. Not to mention our president is also leader of the armed forces.

I suppose then that you'd be happy to make any and all conversations you've had in private during recent years public for all to see.

I've not been sworn to serve The People.

That observation makes as much sense in context as when people compare the national debt to household debt. If the problem is that we might get to know what porn Pelosi likes or whether she has hemorrhoids, the theft of this laptop is trivial.

That's the theoretical argument Assange pushes.

Wikileaks does, however, keeps tons of information about its internal operations secret...

> Wikileaks does, however, keeps tons of information about its internal operations secret...

It shouldn't... as long as its action, as whistleblowers, shouldn't be prosecutable either.

ps: I do think that both Manning AND Snowden (as US citizens) should be pardoned, and charges on Assange (as a non-US citizen) dropped.

Let's say the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee learns via his work that a high-ranking member of the CCP is sending secrets to the United States in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Is it ultimately beneficial for that information to be made fully transparent?

> Full transparency should be paramount.

Full transparency is paramount. It's just not practice.

Because other countries exist.