The way that state secrets used to be handled was simple. The government chose on a case by case basis whether or not they were willing to not present their evidence (potentially losing the case because of it), or whether they wished to present their facts to the judge in camera (meaning in private, in chambers, relying on the judge to maintain confidentiality).
There is no particularly good reason that we could not have maintained that system. But conversely, now that the States Secrets privilege exists, there is no reason why the government shouldn't be aggressive about asserting it.
Because now you are an Empire
The issue here isn't whether the government wants to use secret evidence to prosecute someone else, but whether a plaintiff, to make its case, can force the government to disclose state secrets. That's an entirely different situation, one that historically was extremely rare or even non-existent when the Federal administrative state was miniscule and there weren't broad rights (statutory or court-made) that created rights of action against the government or which waived sovereign immunity (i.e. you couldn't sue the government, period).
Wikipedia's lawsuit begs the question of the injury. Unlawful surveillance by itself wasn't an injury that courts would historically have taken cognizance of, modulo whatever rare exceptions there might have been. Courts wouldn't have considered it their role to squash any and all illegal government behavior; a situation like Wikipedia's claim would have best been addressed through the ballot box.
Remember, courts required and at least nominally still require concrete injuries. A claim without an injury is no claim at all, and invasion of privacy on its own was not a concrete injury. That's a recent judicial creation. The remedy for an illegal search was a) a claim for trespass if trespassing occurred, and b) return of illegally seized evidence, which prevented use at trial only as a consequence of the government no longer being in possession[1] and unable to force the defendant to submit it themself (i.e. self incrimination). If neither situation applied, then an illegal search was of no matter to the court; mere illegality wasn't an injury. Application of an exclusionary rule disconnected from this simple, logical application of traditional rights didn't come about until the past century or two. And the reframing and reconceptualization of traditional constitutional rights as a matter of privacy (as opposed to dominion over property and conscience) and then recognizing an invasion of privacy per se as a concrete injury is an even more recent innovation. Not only recent, but incomplete and perhaps a bit tenuous--the logic of Roe v. Wade is fundamentally grounded in the logic of privacy, which is why Roe v. Wade rests on somewhat shaky legal ground.
[1] Traditional rules of evidence would have required submission of an original document to establish a fact evidenced in the document. A government witness couldn't simply recite it from memory; that would be hearsay. A government created copy would at best have had heavily discounted credibility given the suspect provenance, and I bet often would have been inadmissible--not because of any fruit-of-the-poison-tree logic, but because it's likewise effectively hearsay.
As for your legal theories, they are not exactly accurate. You claim that the government could not use information because they did not have it. But, as in the 1886 case of Boyd v. United States, the government had and tried to use information. It was only on appeal that it was ruled that information that they had from violations of the Constitution could not be used, and therefore decisions depending on that information had to be reversed.
Still the case law did tend strongly to concerns about a practical injury of trespass or a lawsuit.
As for your passing comment about Roe v. Wade, that is disingenuous to the point of outright dishonesty. The reason why that decision is currently on shaky legal ground is that decades of concerted effort have resulted in the appointment of judges chosen for their politics over the quality of their legal reasoning, specifically to overturn that decision.
Whether you agree or disagree with the decision and its reasoning, there is no question that it is an obvious and great imposition on a pregnant woman to force her to continue her pregnancy. The consequences include restrictions on her actions, buying new clothing, frequently a period of being unable to work, intense hormones, common pain and injury during childbirth, with a non-negligible chance of death at the end of it. (Currently that has a 0.017% chance.) Claiming that there is no injury here is ridiculous.
Reynolds was only ever able to sue because the Federal Tort Claims Act, passed only a few years earlier in 1946, made it possible to sue where before a suit would have been impossible. As I said, it's difficult to make broad claims about the historical scope of state secrets privileges viz-z-viz constitutional rights (the issue in the Wikipedia case) when for most of American history, not to mention English history, there rarely if ever would have been occasion for the state to need to make use of a concept like state secrets. Reynolds is really about the scope of waiver of sovereign immunity. Importantly, there were never any constitutional rights implicated, at least not those of the plaintiff, as they didn't have a constitutional right to sue. I hesitate to say that the government had any constitutional rights as IMO it's better to understand the government's claim of privilege in terms of the power of the court viz-a-viz the government, and the courts deference to sovereign immunity.
> But, as in the 1886 case of Boyd v. United States, the government had and tried to use information. It was only on appeal that it was ruled that information that they had from violations of the Constitution could not be used, and therefore decisions depending on that information had to be reversed.
Body v. United States says "It is equivalent to a compulsory production of papers to make the nonproduction of them a confession of the allegations which it is pretended they will prove." As I said, that's a matter of self-incrimination, which while not as ancient as rules regarding property was a well established and core constitutional principle in English law. Interpretation and application of the right against self-incrimination has always been tricky (see, e.g., passwords today), so it's not at all surprising a trial court would rule one way and an appellate court another. Similarly, the dividing line between criminal cases (where a right against self-incrimination applies) and civil cases (where it does not) has likewise never been simple and clear. Furthermore, I said, "Application of an exclusionary rule disconnected from this simple, logical application of traditional rights didn't come about until the past century or two." IOW, the evolution of modern exclusionary rules was an incremental process, both in case law as well as conceptually. There's no limit to how far back one can claim to extend the logic of modern exclusionary rules. But past "a century or two" (and I'm being charitable) it's extremely difficult to make sense of case law using modern legal concepts.
> As for your passing comment about Roe v. Wade, that is disingenuous to the point of outright dishonesty. The reason why that decision is currently on shaky legal ground is that decades of concerted effort have resulted in the appointment of judges chosen for their politics over the quality of their legal reasoning, specifically to overturn that decision.
Are we talking law or politics here? If we stick to law, the legal argument against Roe v. Wade is fundamentally about the existence and nature of constitutional privacy rights. (Or at least it was for most of the past 50 years. See the conservative arguments against Lawrence v. Texas. Now younger conservative jurists have grown up having internalized the concept and many of the implications of privacy rights, which is why they've pivoted to emphasizing fetal rights.)
You assume too much if you a) think I fundamentally disagree with Roe v. Wade or b) believe that I'm an originalist who would not accept the legitimacy of a reframing of constitutional law around the concept of privacy rights. However, it's very difficult to understand how we got where we are today, and where we might go tomorrow, if we insist (like many conservatives do) that there's always and only one correct way to interpret and apply constitutional law, textual or otherwise.
Remember the kangaroo court that is FISA? Bored old men rubber stamping whatever is put in front of them, and even then the services didn't bother with some of the worst things. It took Snowden to expose this - now think again about that podcast of staff lawyers.
What about incidents like https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/2011-ruling-found-an-n...?
No we do not. State Secrets is an affront to concept of "government of the people, for the people"
One can not have an informed public, that is able to choose how the government should function, who to send to represent them, and everything else with a functional self governing population if there is exists secrets from said population
Governments should never be allowed to perform actions in our name while never allowing US to know of those actions. The only thing on that path is corruption and Tyranny