I'm from the UK and I would leak all of the UK government's secrets without a second thought if I was given them. ALL the governments of the world need to be 'dealt with' if we are to solve any of our problems.

So in other words, as long as we prevent the creation of records of shady deals, they will be less likely to engage in them?

what?

how the hell did you arrive at that conclusion?

To prevent lies and shady deals public should be allowed to look at any documents anything ever said, written, recorded by politicians and people in charge.

Some of you really need to leave the fucked up patriotism behind, and face the reality we live in.

I believe patriotism to be one of the worst things that has happened to humanity. Its very core is to divide people.

Let's go to the extreme (since, that is all anyone seems to operate in in this thread :p): Thought police.

Let's say you catch your wife/husband/life partner cheating on you. And for a brief moment, you entertain thoughts of murder. OH NOES! The thought police found out, and Tom Cruise is coming to arrest your ass. No secrets on the government side are required for that.

Or let's say you have a kid who is watching one of the over-sexualized pre-teen pop-stars these days. And, for a brief moment, you have a thought that makes you want to go take a shower to scrub the filth off. OH NOES! Thought police are listing you as a sex offender.

Both are extreme cases, but that IS full transparency. If a diplomat is not allowed to make a comment about a conversation without needing to tell the other diplomats, why should you be allowed to have a private thought?

cause my private thoughts are not deciding the lives of a millions. Politicians are in power, they literally decide who lives or who dies.

and you are going to extremes of extremes.

Thought police? monitoring thoughts and arresting people for bad ones? really? Nobody in this thread went that far or even approaching level like that. Only you.

Full transparency. Literally speaking is possible with something similar to hive mind/borg collective.

the point was being made regarding transparency of government documents and records not frigging souls of every living being.

Actually, you were the one who started saying Big Brother couldn't exist without "secrecy of the state", and I was merely pointing out you were incorrect.

But fine, let's pretend that you really meant to only extend the complete lack of any context of privacy to only the government:

What counts as "government"?

The lady at the DMV?
Private Bullwinkle?

And what about people who work under contract to the government? Researchers at labs. Chauffers/escorts?

no. you did not point out anything Gundato. You are talking about mind reading...
i guess you can say that with magic anything is possible but that's irrelevant in this discussion which I considered quite serious. I am no incorrect on the matter I mentioned in my previous post

All government records should be available to the public.
That does not mean abandoning privacy. It does not mean looking at senator's Smith bathroom and checking what he reads when he is on toilet.
It is checking how much money he spent on official travels...
The DMV example: what are the salaries, how much money is wasted... what happens behind the closed doors.

public having access to some information might be at times unworkable or simply impractical (budget of lunch room in custom depot 3 in El Paso for example)

You are going to extremes so please stop that.

Politicians and those working in / for the public sector are, essentially, employed by the public (at least they should be by the idea of democracy). To know whether they are doing the job we ask them to do (and that we fund them /pay them to do, through tax payments) we need to be able to evaluate them. [Swedish Politicians have to have their tax declaration publicly accessible - you can look their declaration up through internet pages - that, at least, is a good first step.]

Transparency when focused on people in office doesn't mean looking at their private social life / personality. It means looking at their networks, their financial gains and pressures, connections and "powerful friends". It means looking at what the contracts / dealings they sign really spell out, who advised them on them, and it has to include the right to question them on their conclusions. Transparency means people are accountable, and yes it puts pressures on them, but that's part of what any one doing a professional job, anywhere, has to face. Your employers will want to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and heck, you'd be fucked if you'd tried to "classify" information from them.

Even, with, for example, people working in the mental health sector where some sort of secrecy and protection of identity is essential there's accountability. Social workers / therapists / counsellors have to present their patient cases to another in general terms and show that what they are doing is, over time, actually for the good of their client. There are always ways to be transparent even if the information is "tricky" in nature.

It also means that if something is deemed not for the eyes of the public it must be really, really, really justified. An uniformed public can not be a democratic public.

For me - the most interesting thing about the whole wikipedia thing is, rather then the leaks, just how much people seem to have lapped up that "knowing things" is somehow not something to want or wish for. I guess it is rather despairing.

You had to resort to the use of methods that are currently not possible and may never be possible with the use of mind reading however. If we accept that as possible then we could argue that under current international law gnolls are not properly protected, just in case. Unless you can point out how Big Brother can exist without secrecy of the state without resorting to fictional methods then no you have not proven him incorrect.

EDIT: slow posting at work, getting behind on the convo lol.

Yeah, I'm not aware of any other huge cities that were left as ruins for so long by the Japanese government. I actually liked White Light, Black Rain, it had the fortitude to show the truly nasty pictures of what the radiation did. Sure, conventional bombs suck too. Hell, Clinton launched an obscene number of Tomahawks at Baghdad when we weren't even ostensibly at war, those had to do some serious damage.

It serves politicians' careers and justifies the need for soldiers too. : )

Oh, ok. I understand now. Sorry. That sounds good. At least for politicians. Not so sure about military, because giving away our military tactics is step one to getting overrun.

George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove lied to you about the threat Saddam Hussein represents with his weapons of mass destruction, sending your nation at war with Iraq. Once enough people didn't buy this lie anymore, they lied about a connection between Saddam, Al-Qaida and 9/11, to keep you in this war. As a result, hundreds of your soldier and thousands of civilians died.

None of them is jailed. You actually pay G. Bush's retirement with your tax dollars.

But apparently they are proud of that. (the ones that defend their government's decision to attack innocent people)