I guess my main concern over this most recent round of releases is my belief that there are certain aspects of diplomacy, perhaps even the majority of them, that should remain under wraps. It's sort of the cost of Getting Things Done...there needs to be that confidence that neither side will go blabbing about the particulars, or else the mutual trust that enables many diplomatic maneuverings simply won't exist. I don't really see how making the whole process transparent truly benefits anyone: it makes the diplomats' jobs that much harder, and the general public simply gets riled up over a bunch of out-of-context information they didn't really need to know in the first place.
Ultimately, secrecy only enables one thing, one thing that is unfortunately the basis of the current political system based on national states: All governments are tasked to advance their own country's interests, and not anyone else's.
With fully open dealings, this would become much harder to accomplish.
Of course, this tangent can further be extrapolated to a direction where we would start arguing whether or not national states are a viable means of managing the human population of Earth (it is my belief they are not), and how long will it take for the power of national states to diminish and a capable world wide system of governance to develop.
Because the fact of the matter is that as long as national states spend vast resources in their petty squabbling rather than resolving the real issues, our limited resources will diminish that much faster and the worst case scenario is that at some point, the overall standards of living will no longer be capable of rising, but they start to drop, regardless of advances in science and technology after that point.
Case in point - Iran wants a nuclear bomb [citation needed] when they could use the nuclear material as fuel in reactors to generate power - to have some kind of foil to a supposed nuclear threat from the west, or to have a first strike weapon though I doubt even the Iranians would be rabid enough to do that aside from Ahmadinejad. The fact they think they need a nuke can have three reasons - either they think someone would be ready and willing to use a nuke against them and they think they need a deterrant by entering MAD doctrine; or they want to have first strike capability; or it's strictly a political game with neither sides willing to actually ever use the nukes outside negotiations table as a chip for taking them seriously, or something.
Another example would be the incredible waste of human resources that goes on in strictly islamic countries in the Middle-East and Africa; roughly half of the population is refused real work, real education and real human rights, which causes incredible voluntary reduction to the productivity of the country, standards of living of the population at large, and also increases population growth to strain the already limited resources further - all because the religious and/or ideological leaders of the people want to stay in the position of secular authority, and they well know that all three factors - better education, higher standards of living, and more resources for fewer people - would reduce people's adherence to their authority.
Even in western industrial countries, the question whether national states really have a justification to exist on a wider perspective is valid.
National states require a degree of self-interest from their governments - by definition, the governments are tasked to do what is best for the country (whether their definition of "best for the country" agrees with the rest of the country is another question). In democratic states, the governments are elected and given mandate to govern the country as they see fit, but that doesn't mean they should be free of scrutiny during their tenure. That's called dictatorship (see the original definition of dictator if you are confused by this).
I don't know if the US system has any equivalent of this, but in Finland we have this so-called
vote of no confidence. It means that if the government does something, and the members of parliament disagree with it, they can call a vote of no confidence against the government, and if it passes, a new government will be formed from the pool of members of the parliament.
But if the government is allowed to classify information indescriminately, simply because they say something is classified, that would mean the parliament might never find out they've done something that would warrant their removal.
Personally I would love for the bill preparation phase to be more transparent in Finland. Currently, bills are usually prepared in relative secrecy - especially the controversial ones such as the so called "mandatory media lisence" which sparked a lot of public opposition when it finally did come into public knowledge, but they did try to get it approved on a rather short schedule. Similarly I would love to know what kind of stuff was considered in the EU when they passed the edict that basically bans incandescent light bulbs in favour of so-called "energy saving" lamps - I have my suspicions about what were the real motivating factors behind that directive. Things like this I would very much love to have more information of.
In general, I would classify (heh) the information in the following groups:
Things like information about undercover intelligence operatives - I personally have no interest in, but I also think such things are fundamentally needless and are only necessitated by the existence of national states and their competition with each other. If not for the national states, national intelligence operatives wouldn't exist, and thus "national security" would not be threatened.
Things like information about unethical business practices - I would welcome, if only to make educated choices as a consumer and to show my contempt or support to different corporations.
Things like information about ongoing lawful military operations, ongoing criminal investigations or other law enforcement operations - I have no need to know this, and Wikileaks publishing this type of information I would not approve.
Things like information about screwed up military operations or illegitimate military operations, I would like to know about.
Things like information about people's private lives I have no interest in and it's none of my business either.
Can anyone think of other classifications for information?
