What you have to do is

1. Any agency can designate a document as classified, a designation which remains in play for four years. This dovetails nicely with the election cycle. Also, the majority of police, etc. undercover operations are shorter than this period. Above this you are in "major case" / RICO / terrorism / etc. territory.

2. Extending the classification beyond four years requires a motion to show cause before a bona fide judiciary, where the agency must show by clear and convincing evidence that the classification falls into an enumerated exemption criteria. The classification can be extended indefinitely, but only in increments of 12 months and only upon the approval of the judicial branch.

A proposal like this addresses most people's objections. The real problem with the current classification scheme is A) like Mickey Mouse's copyright, it expires on paper but not in real life, and B) the agencies are all essentially self-policing and nobody really checks in on them to see if the classification decisions are correct.

The thing about this proposal is that it requires all three branches to sign off and say "yes, this should stay classified" and it also limits the number of secrets you can have, because there are only so many lawyers and so many judges, and now you have to decide if you want to allocate time in the budget to make motions for the next 50 years. There are legitimate secrets that are worth that kind of hassle, and then there are the other 90% of stuff that the alphabet soup of agencies does.

Here in Australia too many governments agencies spend tax payer’s money, issuing big contracts to private companies and the all the contract details remain secret.

One example was a company awarded the right to build a cross city tunnel toll way. The contract included a $100 million payout to a government body in exchange for massive road closures designed to divert traffic into the (toll paying) tunnel.

All the road closures did was create traffic chaos and the secret collusion was only revealed when the tunnel company went broke.

I don't think that there need to be undercover police officers.

> Who are informants on terrorist organizations working against the state?

I don't think there need to be informants on terrorist organizations.

> The home phone numbers and addresses of all public employees? Their emergency contact numbers? Medical histories relevant to their jobs?

I wouldn't classify (teehee) this as "government secrets." If they're public employees, then obviously their names should be public, but I don't see their personal information as a "government secret."

> crippling the capacity of government to do kinds of work that it has to do does not.

People disagree about which kinds of work have to be done by government.

Even some of the most staunch anarcho-capitalists I know believe in centralized national defense as one of the very few legitimate functions of the state.

Would not having planes invisible to radar (B-2), or those that could fly faster than missiles (SR-71) be nice secrets to keep from everyone who's thinking about invading you?

Really? You or they must be using the term "anarcho-capitalism" in a non-standard way. In the standard usage of the term, the whole point is to be distinguished from pro-government libertarians and minarchists who believe that there are a few legitimate functions of the state. I've never heard anyone use the term to refer to an ideology that accepts any legitimate functions of the state.

I'm not claiming any authority over the term "anarcho-capitalism," and you can use it however you like, but I have read a lot of works by people who are widely considered to be pivotal to anarcho-capitalism, and I've been somewhat active in several online communities that call themselves anarcho-capitalist, and I am reasonably confident that your usage is incredibly non-standard, and that very few people who are aware of the term would use it to describe minarchists.

I'm strongly against it. A lot of our breakthroughs are too expensive for dangerous countries to copy in any case.

> be nice secrets to keep from everyone who's thinking about invading you?

When is the last time the US was invaded by anyone? When is the last time any country even tried to invade the US? If all your justifications are about nightmare scenarios that haven't occurred in centuries they're probably not very good justifications.

Why do you think those answers are what they are?

Could it be that the latest public data we have is that we were building planes FIFTY YEARS AGO that could effortlessly outrun SAMs? Can you possibly imagine the shit that is flying out of Groom Lake these days?

The US' geographical position has had more to do with their safety than any secret they've ever had. But don't let me disrupt your "G.I. Joe" comic book fantasies.

There is no global existential threat that is anywhere near as grave as the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union once was.

So, where is secrecy really needed? Is it more than 5% of the secrecy we have?

Honest question: What danger would that put us in? My instinct says a moderate amount, but I guess none of us know for sure, which makes it a little scary to imagine.

Contrast this with things like NSA: no end date, literally global scope, etc. Surely you can see how these things are different.

What if what they're not telling us is that FISA collection orders and analysis has kept people from nuking Manhattan a half-dozen times?

There is no number high enough to make me think getting rid of government secrecy is a bad idea. The reason is that there are other methods to deal with these kinds of problems. If other countries want to nuke us, it's probably a better idea to find out why they want to nuke us then to become a police state.

>What if what they're not telling us is that FISA collection orders and analysis has kept people from nuking Manhattan a half-dozen times?

What if they've also kept the big fight between Godzilla and King Kong from us? This is nonsense, they have not stopped anything like that. Pretty much everything terrorists have actually tried to do, they've succeed (or were foiled by their own incompetence). The cases where the government actually managed to "stop" a terror attack were very clear cases of entrapment. If they're actually out there like Jason Bourne saving the US in the last second all the time, why would they chose to show us clear cases of entrapment as their success stories?

But if you really believe they're keeping us safe, then I'd like to give you a great offer on my anti-Godzilla rock. Godzilla has not so much as inconvenienced me on the way to work since I have this rock. I'm willing to make you a great deal on it, $1B. That's less than you're paying for the other charade.

What will your next step be, when you learn that the answer to your question is "Religion"?

The saddest part is, we appear to have learned literally nothing since our handling of native Americans. It's disgusting.

You're engaging in wishful thinking.

If you truly believe there are a group of people for whom religion is enough to make them want to kill, then the solution would be education and financial investment. Middle class people make poor martyrs. The idea that the only thing that can be done is murder them is sickening.

There are many religious people who openly explain that freedom is evil, and everyone should convert to Islam or face death.

You're essentially claiming that I am brainwashed, and you know the real truth instead. I'd like to claim the opposite.

The problem with your argument is that it basically allows the government to do anything it wants, and then claim that there is secret information that proves that what they are doing is necessary to save lives.

In my view, there is a need for government secrets. Diplomatic cables need to be secret. The names and locations of informants and spies need to be kept secret (I will not deny the need for such agents). During times of war, the locations and planned movements of troops must be kept secret. On the other hand, the existence of diplomats, the existence of spies, and the existence of the military absolutely should not be kept secret.

Whoa, you've just gone all straw-man on me. Stop presuming and just answer my question. Somewhere between "nothing happens" and "vaporizes the whole planet" is a consequence that makes the loss of privacy an acceptable option. Where is it?

I didn't make an argument one way or the other.