The governed cannot consent if they are uninformed.
Assange is not relevant here; what matters is that the US government was keeping secrets of war crimes from the very people to whom the government is accountable.
There is a strong moral argument to be made that the government has no rights to secrets kept from its citizenry.
Such arguments don't hold water when the process of classification is determined by a fairly elected representative of that citizenry.
Americans could elect somebody who promised to ditch classification altogether, but they wouldn't, because reality is not so clear.
Democracy being the least worst option doesn't absolve it from criticism.
Yes, they could still vote to abolish state secrets altogether. But I think knowledge about how secrecy is abused is also very much relevant to an informed vote on such a matter.
Specific opinions cannot be expressed by electing a "representative".
Elect an idiot like Trump who leaks secrets to foreign governments at the drop of a hat?
If anything, the fact of Americas military-industrial-pharmacuetical complex covering up crimes against humanity (torture program) and real war crimes (every twenty minutes) makes American leaders even more susceptible to corruption and influence by non-democratically elected actors, state or otherwise.
You'd rather the country be run by shady Blackwater types protected by ultimate state secrecy than have to deal with state diplomacy as its always been?
Wikileaks exposed pretty clear cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity where the laws and policies and "ethics" of the situation are very well documented, and are very well understood among the sovereign states which ratified them. These are clear crimes we are talking about.
The American military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex is inconvenienced by these crimes being exposed - not the American people, in whose names these acts are committed, and who bear ultimate responsibility for the actions of their state.
Knowing what is being done in your name by your government representatives is a good thing - you cannot be a responsible citizen otherwise.
Furthermore, the argument I was responding to failed to allow any nuance or qualification to the reasons the government keeps secrets. Certainly there is a big difference between broad policy decisions or matters of chain of responsibility than there is between tactical information and contextual data collection. I understand government secrecy for the latter, but not the former. I certainly am not going to conflate the two, even as I concede that one is necessary and the distinction hard to enforce.
> You'd rather the country be run by shady Blackwater types protected by ultimate state secrecy than have to deal with state diplomacy as its always been?
Secrecy has always been a part of state diplomacy. What world do you love in that this is not the case?
And this is why the world is perpetually at war. Those who have the power to stop the war-mongers (The People) don't have any idea what is really going on - thus diplomacy has been usurped from most democracies around the world, and is thus: broken.
No, that's because we have an entire industrial complex surrounding making war profitable.
We had state secrets far before then and there were very long periods of peace.
The many, many, many times things have leaked with absolutely no major public reaction would show that to be false.