>If you philosophically reject all warfare, espionage, and law enforcement, then there is no legitimate reason for a government secret.

Law enforcement doesn't need to be based on secrecy. I never said you have to broadcast that you're investigating someone, just that the information about who, how, and why you're investigating someone be reasonably public (going through real courts to get warrants and such).

As for war, if we're in a defensive war we can chat about not letting the army put their immediate plans up for all to see.

Ditto with the case about the Olympics in a sibling thread. I see the usefulness in _short-term_, someone's-life-is-in-danger (not because the state put them there), secrecy.

> That doesn't address the problem the White House faced in the Cold War. Namely, how do you ensure the nuclear deterrent is credible even when lines of communication have broken down? If you rely on Shamir Secret Sharing, then retaliation would be impossible if the secret holders are unable to communicate with each other.

The basic idea would be to have redundancy in channel, location, mode, since we're talking about a case in which the chain of command's top has been ripped off leaving many higher-ranking officers at the top of the new chains. An attacker wouldn't be able to take out all (all routes for all modes all over the US) of the communication network simultaneously, especially if we're not talking about superbly massive bombings in which case there would/should be detection.

Also, to be credible, you're assuming the US is telling other's about their system (so that the USSR knows/will think that it can't simply take out the president and there won't be retaliation). Otherwise it's all just based on speculation and in terms of deterrent doesn't matter what the actual system is.

So instead of saying "in a communications breakdown everyone does what they think is best, so someone is going to retaliate" it's "there can't be a communications breakdown because of redundancy in mode, route, and location; so in the event of a collapse of the chain of command, it can only collapse so far and hence retaliatory action is still possible."

This just seems better in practice as well. There is the Dr. Strangelove example of someoene just taking power, and one can also imagine that someone innocently loses communication and assumes the worst.

> You're shifting the meaning of "worst-case scenario." I used the term to refer to a physical threat, external to the government, which the government is responsible for defending against. You're using the term to refer to a pathology of the government itself. So, the scenario you envision is not the one to which I was referring.

Why must it be external, though. Both you and I are concerned about how the government should operate in a manner that protects the populace; I'm just saying that from the populace's POV, the government is/can be an external threat. Look at Kiev right now.

Yes, there will be (exceptional) times when secrets are needed; I get that. Those should be exceptions, and not the rule, as it feels like it is now.

I just think that erroring on the side of transparency, and not doing actions that would otherwise be limited by that transparency (e.g. covert operations) is the better option in terms of dealing with external _and_ internal threats than is secrecy.

Also, an ideal would be for emergency measures to simply flow from the normal operational measures. In the nuke example, forcing some sub-set of commanders to agree that they've received orders to launch nukes (and by implication of participation agree with them and have verified them) before nukes could be launched. The emergency situation is now simply that instead of confirming an order from above, they confirm that they all agree that the situation is such that they should launch.