He makes three distinct points and each are wholesale defenses of secrets, and the second two combine to ignore the fact that it's a government entity making the secrets and dismiss the lack of transparency as important, again, especially given the laws we're discussing. I don't know how I have possibly mischaracterized what's occurred here.

What am I missing here? They've boiled this down to completely trivial examples that ignore the gross violations in Constitutional rights via gagged court orders, NSLs, FISA warrants and courts, warrantless wiretapping, etc, etc. They're debating the need for having IDs to buy alcohol as a defense of secret government laws that are meant for protection.

This is the quint-essential "security vs liberty" and "governmental security through obscurity". It's old, I've been debating it for years. Frankly, it's intellectually weak.

Well, no, it's not "intellectually weak".

You seem to be taking an absolutist position against secrecy. Personally, I'd argue that such a position is completely untenable if you want a country that survives its first conflict, but that's not really relevant.

What is relevant is the following:

* Moving the discussion away from "secrecy is always evil" and toward discussing specific instances.

* Acknowledging that a court ruling can be legally correct even if you personally would disagree with the results of that ruling.

* Learning to avoid reflex reactions and instead actually digging to see what happened and evaluating arguments.

For the record, to illustrate an example of mischaracterization, when he wrote "One is that the court case hinged on the claim that the policy was secret. The court's response was that the ID requirement was clearly posted for everyone to see...", I would not classify that paragraph as a "wholesale defense of secrets". But if that's how you see it, that's how you see it.