From the very personal level all the way up to the transactions of high muckety-mucks and higher-muckety nations, people, governments, and corporations all keep secrets. Some keep them better than others but I think ultimately most beans get spilled - the variables are in the when, where, and how.
I have argued that Wikileaks and Julian Assange have done damage to the U.S. national interest (not to mention other interests); and that the leaks should be prosecuted. I suspect that lowly private Bradley Manning, who is the prime suspect in providing the huge cache of documents to Assange in the first place, will face a more stringent justice than Assange.
And that's not necessarily off the mark: Manning's offense is of the first water - shall we say, "first degree leakage" -- while Assange's is less direct. I recall the big flap when a then-anonymous government official outed CIA officer Valerie Plame to columnist Joe Novak. No one thought to prosecute Novak, though technically the offense was defined as "publicizing" such information, and it was clearly Novak who had publicized it, once he was privy to it. Of course that was a single fact, and here instead we have... a LOT of information.
Journalists inevitably argue that once such information is available, the public has a right to know. Daniel Ellsberg thinks so, too. On the large scale of things, they're right. That's the essence of freedom of the press. Ellsberg's revelations have long since been forgotten; the harm they probably did was kept quiet and not acknowledged, which will be the case this time, too. That's why Assange can claim to a television reporter that there is not one confirmation that anyone has died as a result of the leaks. Of course not; no one is going to confirm, which would only risk further damage. So Assange may be prosecuted somewhere for something, but it's unlikely to be very successful.
In some other areas, the media's insistence on the public's "right to know" is probably less solidly grounded. The first amendment freedom of the press has essentially a political character, just as the Second Amendment has essentially a militia character. "Right to know" can be turned into a ridiculous shadow of itself when it's imputed to everything.
So I'm always dumfounded, for example, by reports about how criminals have been caught; often they detail exactly how the evil-doer gave himself away. In one recent case, a Washington Post reporter's home was burglarized by a guy who recorded his deed on the Facebook page of his victim, and the reporter wrote a column about it. Does the criminal have a right to know? Are we conducting training to make better crooks, or might it not be better to leave them in the dark about what they did wrong? We'd like to think the bad guy is stupid and will soon be caught, but I'm recalling a similar case of a bank robber in England at least a year ago, and I can't remember seeing news that he was ever apprehended.
Terrorists, too, can benefit from just keeping up with the TV news, as our media reps insist on airing everything: how things are being done, what is working and what isn't, which airports are least secure, and the like. One recent example: Reports that up to 70% of test runs with clearly visible weapons in luggage escape detection. Here again, I think the main beneficiaries of this kind of revelation are probably the terrorists.
So yes, nearly everyone, and every organization, has secrets. Often there are perfectly good reasons not to reveal every detail of everything. (Note to secret-stashers: Usually, the desire to keep something under wraps only because it might be embarrassing is NOT a legitimate reason!) Purposeful leaks will surely, and should, continue to be prosecuted by keepers of the official order.
Meanwhile, corporations seem to do somewhat better in keeping their secrets than other holders of sensitive materials. Can anyone tell me, for example, how to get an honest description of a cell phone contract from a wireless carrier's representative? Now that would be very much in the public interest.
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