Privacy rule

Your post implies that government is good by default.

There's hiding bad activity the government was elected to perform, like intelligence meddling in foreign affairs to protect the country's interests, and there's hiding activity to shield themselves from voter accountability, like using the apparatus to enrich other parts of government at a direct cost to its own citizens, or shield malicious actors from accountability.

They do lots of both, so why trust by default?

Your post implies that government is good by default.

Not really. It just deals with the reality of the here and now.

It's why you first demand the politicians don't hide anything. All their financial records should be open: what restaurants did they eat, what trips they took and who they received money from. Maybe delayed with a year because of national security. Nothing to hide as an elite example to the general population.

So you think it's wise to give civilians unrestricted access to military intelligence, and allow them to hand that over to hostile foreign governments?
- They were clearly talking about the politicians being he correct target of unrestricted information access and not the state itself
  
  Likely for the obvious reason your alluding to here
  
  Okay, but that's not what OP was talking about.
  
  Yes it was.
  
  All their financial records should be open: what restaurants did they eat, what trips they took and who they received money from.

Well said.

I have no problem with the State having its secrets. It's a necessity, and one of the many reasons that public trust in their government is so important (which itself is another can of worms).

I just feel that it's equally if not more important that individual citizens are also entitled to their secrets, and in fact the presumption of privacy absent consent or significant circumstances.

they also hide a lot of stuff for bad reasons

They sure do.

What would they want to hide?

I can't tell if you're being serious...
- I am.
  
  So you think it would be wise to leak military secrets to a hostile foreign government?
  
  Okay, fair point. But they shouldn't hide how they track people.
  
  Okay, fair point, but now you're changing what they said.
  
  So we both agree on what they should and shouldn't hide?
  
  quick, let's notify the future shooter how government may track him so that he'll take the exact necessary steps to not be caught before committing a shooting. and the foreign spy. and the person who plans to sell/traffic illegal items. they deserve a right to know exactly how the government tracks them, after all
  
  how do you catch criminals if they know exactly how the government would catch them? saying the government has nothing to hide if it has nothing to fear is very wrong
  
  And the people who are the majority and didn't do a single thing wrong. Let's implement vulnerabilities in software and pray to god that they don't get hacked. Let's make privacy illegal!
  
  so your solution is for the government to notify people of those vulnerabilities so others can immediately take abuse of them? because people know that the government makes backdoors on a lot of tech, it's no secret to people, your "solution" wouldn't exactly achieve anything. the current government doesn't care about collateral so it's not like they'd just stop doing it.
  
  That's the problem. Governments just shouldn't implement backdoors. That way there is more good done than harm, not the other way around.
  
  of course, but that's not an issue with "the government needs to not be able to hide anything". you can't just nitpick some examples of where it may do good to justify the position – you open an entire can of worms with the vagueness. should they have to disclose a list of all the people theyre keeping tabs on, how theyre doing so, and the info they hold on them? that would be extremely dangerous for society. should they disclose the exact methods which they use to track people? again, you're just showing the people they're tracking (for good reason) how to avoid being tracked. if you just want no backdoors then say "we shouldn't have government backdoors", but the only way to properly ensure that the government isn't illegally doing so is by exposing a whole lot more stuff that may not go so nicely.
  
  i don't want the government surveilling me illegally, but i find it reasonable that the government can hide a lot of stuff for the sake of all safety. i also find it reasonable for them to be audited extensively. do I trust the government? lol no, but i can't complain about the government not previously keeping tabs on obvious shooters, then say i don't want the government keeping secrets like that... it's one or the other.
  
  obviously many specific things shouldn't be able to be hidden by the government. but you're painting with a broad brush

Sure, intel regarding specific currently-clandestine state operations. Everything else should be transparent to the public, and to not do so is to imply the state does not serve the public, either by failure or by malicious capture. Rather it serves the officials themselves, and the Plutocrats they obey.

Embarrassments to the regime are not operational secrets, rather are the specific beat of the ~~fifth~~ fourth estate, specifically, unaligned freelance journalists. Every single time a politician goes all Florida man, it should be public news. If that makes them unelectable, that's a hazard of public office. There's always the private sector.

To this day, some people are serving prison sentences similar to murder one (or the assassination of Dr. George Tiller) for the exposure of political embarrassments. The US has a sophisticated system of ambiguous laws specifically for targeting enemies of the state (rather than enemies of the public) without defining an actual harm they caused. Any of us can be convicted of such crimes without evidence.

This tells us where the priorities of the justice system lie: not in protecting the public but preserving the regime. And down to the last clerk every court official, every police officer deserves be hunted down like Schutzstaffel officers fleeing to South America for their complicity in a system that regards the public as the enemy.

So long as corruption within the state is a threat to the public, transparency is a necessity, and when state agents disparage news investigators, calling them FOIA terrorists it shows us corruption with impunity is taken for granted among our officials.

If they are not openly subject to scrutiny, if they punish those who would expose their wrongdoing in the name of state security, if they do not willingly subject themselves to investigation and justice, the alternative that remains is to burn the whole motherfucker down.

Note: This may be a sore spot for me. We seem to learn about atrocities and constitutional violations ten years too late. But yes, some whistleblowers spend the rest of their lives in supermaxes and black sites getting their meals slid through a wall slot.

Fine. They can hide the stuff they don't force me to pay for. I have a right to know where my money is going.

So you feel it would be wise for civilians to have unrestricted access to military intelligence?

You can't see how that could end up in disaster?
- You don't see how the military operating in darkness with no oversight has ended up in disaster time and time again?
  
  Sure -- doesn't compare to what would happen if it was suddenly all open knowledge.
  
  Then don't make me pay for it. That's my intelligence, I bought it. So did you. What else do you pay for that you're never allowed to see or even know about?
  
  If we're redesigning how society works, there's quite a few things I'd change.
  
  But here, in our current reality, it's not a good idea for all the states secrets to suddenly be public.
That just results in a new Iran-Contra affair.