Comment Re:Open source government? (Score 1) 239
So to me this raises a fundamental philosophical question: why keep secrets at all, as a government?
Because nations have adversaries. This adversarial relationship can be as benign as economic competitors, instead of full-blown hot/cold war enemies. At the level of governments, control of information flow is a form of power.
For example, consider the game of chess. In chess, the entire state of the game is visible to all players at all times. There are no secrets. But there's no way to enforce anything like that in the complexity of the real world. Imagine how a game of chess would go if just one of the competitors could choose to hide the locations of their pieces, what moves they've made, and even when they've made moves. No high-stakes human organization would either unilaterally submit to being the "out in the open" player. Nor would they refuse the leverage that information control provides. To do so would essentially be organizational (if not literal) suicide.
This does pose a dilemma: if a government must resort to information control, what kinds of "process controls" are needed in a democratic society to maintain a sufficiently informed electorate? Note: "sufficiently informed" isn't just information about the government, but information about the entire world the society must interact with. Even more importantly: how might we measure the health of information flow and knowledge within a society?