WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

All institutions are corrupt.

No, you don't need to continue your litany without context. I here a lot of bleating about national security, good of the state, and all, but that is used far too often as a blanket justification to cover up anything. Restriction, or manipulation, of information is what gave rise to the powers that your examples had to counter. For example, if all information relevant to the public, was public, then the Afghan/Iraq wars would never have happened.

Foolish and suicidal to prevent state secrets? I would say it should be a mandatory past time and actively encouraged. How can you have a democracy that includes censorship? If knowledge is power, and it certainly is, as a government's legitimacy can be hinged upon the concealment of a truth, or the propagation of a lie, then the systems in place should err on the side of transparency.

Perhaps then a compromise should be made, all governmental information should be made completely available in raw form by the end of a governments term, irrespective of content. Secrets like those you listed, are a grey area, perhaps these special cases can be protected further if they are indeed legitimate cases. However, let there be an open real time record kept of who requested the information to be restricted and for what reasons, but eventually and with in a reasonable time frame, 5-10 years or soon enough to break a career if that is warranted. Abuses of the system can therefore be tracked.

I would go a little further and remove any laws surrounding information (that includes copyright and patent laws), and make it a completely moral issue when it comes to a secrecy. A more open society is a more equal society, and where there are fewer power imbalances you will get fewer abuses of power.

(For sake of clarity, I am not including private information; medical records, etc, unless there is good justification. I can imagine the revelations of schizophrenia for a would be government official, demographically related illnesses (eg all war veterans of X suffer higher rates of cancer), would be desirable.)

"How can you have a democracy that includes censorship?"

If it wasn't for censorship, democracy wouldn't have survived the 20th century. There are concrete, non-hypothetical secrets democratic states did keep during the 20th century which safeguarded their continued existence and the reestablishment of democracy throughout much of the world.

Everything you say can and has been applied to every power of the state--the power to make war, the power to collect taxes, the power to enforce law, you name it. Each of these powers has been abused. Each of these powers--including the power to keep secrets--needs to be restricted and kept in check, but not abolished. That way lies anarchy, a fundamentally untested system when applied conscientiously to a modern society and a violent nightmare when applied haphazardly anywhere we've observed it in settled societies.[1]

"A more open society is a more equal society, and where there are fewer power imbalances you will get fewer abuses of power. For sake of clarity, I am not including private information; medical records, etc, unless there is good justification."

Privacy and secrecy are two names for the same thing.

[1] Whether hunter-gatherer societies were fundamentally anarchic is an interesting but, in this context, irrelevant anthropological question.

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

Another side issue:

"In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on."

No, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is exactly why our governments did nothing to stop the murders in Darfur or Rwanda. Humanitarian intervention in a matter of no interest to one's people is the act of a benevolent despot, not a democracy--at least when there's lives on the line. (The closest the US has gotten to "humanitarian intervention" as of late was the nonsense in the Balkans where Clinton was careful to forbid any measures which would have actually endangered American lives, even at the expense of civilian lives on the other side.) Normal people fundamentally don't care about the other. Instead of a few people being upset about millions of African deaths by genocide, everyone would be absolutely livid about thousands of (for example) American deaths by combat in a godforsaken part of the world that doesn't effect us. Normal people don't have the stomach to see their people die for some stranger around the world with whom they have nothing in common.

Afghanistan was revenge against people who killed Americans. Iraq was misplaced revenge for the same motive--and when it became clear to most Americans that they held no emotional or practical interest in Iraq, they turned against the war completely, with all the idealistic arguments about how the war deposed a brutal, murderous despot falling on deaf ears. How do you really think ordinary people would have reacted to Bush invading Sudan, or for that matter Clinton invading Rwanda after all the mess in Somalia?

And without these damn governments helping us, how exactly are you and I going to stop millions of machete-wielding Hutus, eh?