We can't avoid the collection of secrets without talking about the power of secrets. Governments collect secrets because uncollected secrets can actually be very powerful.

One of the sources of power that a secret gives you is the element of surprise.

Probably the scariest instance of this, to a government tasked with providing security to its citizens, would be a unique, valuable operational capability, particularly one that has to do with technology, that one country develops in secret.

They are paranoid about this because of the lessons of the 20th century. Sonar, fighters with jet engines, radar, and so very many other things. All the way up to something as dramatic as the atom bomb. All were secret at some point, and all conferred tremendous exclusive operational advantages at one point.

So that's one extreme and obvious example of the value of secrets: secret operational capabilities can mean that when conflict comes between nations, the nation with no idea of its neighbors' secrets could be terribly unprepared.

There are solutions to that that could avoid the need for secrets, but they're impractical: stop having wars, or get all nations to tell each other what their capabilities are (and would they be believed anyway?)

Looking for and collecting lots of secrets is the only way that governments striving for security can do their job, because you don't know what you don't know. Unless you look.

That's a big problem. And changing that value proposition seems unrealistic for humans -- or at least, it seems like the kind of change that hasn't happened since they started living in groups!

Realistic solutions to the problems raised by the Summer Of Snowden probably have more to do with drawing lines about what secrets are out of bounds, and trying to establish better oversight, than in trying to get rid of Intelligence by making governments transparent.

> Simply because everyone thinks it's OK for governments to deal in secrets makes it OK. Noöne seems willing to conceive of a system where secrets are the exceptional, special case and not the norm.

This is frankly confirmation bias. Secrets are the exception in our government, and in most governments, because they are by nature public entities. It's just that you place very little value on the other information out there (and so does the government, and so do other governments, which is why they're not secret in the first place).

The topic of these conversations starts out with the presumption that the secrets are the important bits to discuss. That makes it incredibly difficult to recognize the presence of other pieces of information right in front of your eyes, because it looks like background noise.

Unlike mr_luc, I do have a solution, but it's not a politically feasible one: a world government. There's a quibble there about the need for things like wiretaps for law enforcement, but I'd be willing to bet that it's a lot less necessary to have operational security even for things like that.