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Your post implies that government is good by default.

There's hiding bad activity the government was elected to perform, like intelligence meddling in foreign affairs to protect the country's interests, and there's hiding activity to shield themselves from voter accountability, like using the apparatus to enrich other parts of government at a direct cost to its own citizens, or shield malicious actors from accountability.

They do lots of both, so why trust by default?

It's why you first demand the politicians don't hide anything. All their financial records should be open: what restaurants did they eat, what trips they took and who they received money from. Maybe delayed with a year because of national security. Nothing to hide as an elite example to the general population.

Well said.

I have no problem with the State having its secrets. It's a necessity, and one of the many reasons that public trust in their government is so important (which itself is another can of worms).

I just feel that it's equally if not more important that individual citizens are also entitled to their secrets, and in fact the presumption of privacy absent consent or significant circumstances.

they also hide a lot of stuff for bad reasons

Sure, intel regarding specific currently-clandestine state operations. Everything else should be transparent to the public, and to not do so is to imply the state does not serve the public, either by failure or by malicious capture. Rather it serves the officials themselves, and the Plutocrats they obey.

Embarrassments to the regime are not operational secrets, rather are the specific beat of the ~~fifth~~ fourth estate, specifically, unaligned freelance journalists. Every single time a politician goes all Florida man, it should be public news. If that makes them unelectable, that's a hazard of public office. There's always the private sector.

To this day, some people are serving prison sentences similar to murder one (or the assassination of Dr. George Tiller) for the exposure of political embarrassments. The US has a sophisticated system of ambiguous laws specifically for targeting enemies of the state (rather than enemies of the public) without defining an actual harm they caused. Any of us can be convicted of such crimes without evidence.

This tells us where the priorities of the justice system lie: not in protecting the public but preserving the regime. And down to the last clerk every court official, every police officer deserves be hunted down like Schutzstaffel officers fleeing to South America for their complicity in a system that regards the public as the enemy.

So long as corruption within the state is a threat to the public, transparency is a necessity, and when state agents disparage news investigators, calling them FOIA terrorists it shows us corruption with impunity is taken for granted among our officials.

If they are not openly subject to scrutiny, if they punish those who would expose their wrongdoing in the name of state security, if they do not willingly subject themselves to investigation and justice, the alternative that remains is to burn the whole motherfucker down.

Note: This may be a sore spot for me. We seem to learn about atrocities and constitutional violations ten years too late. But yes, some whistleblowers spend the rest of their lives in supermaxes and black sites getting their meals slid through a wall slot.

What would they want to hide?

Fine. They can hide the stuff they don't force me to pay for. I have a right to know where my money is going.