But people are not institutions, so it is unreasonable to draw institutional analogies to personal privacy. And there's George W. Bush's face up there, so let's talk about institutions.

When we accept public office, there are clearly defined rules — or were, between 1905 and 1980, and even less during the most recent administration, which ignored those rules — about what one must disclose. One of the standards of political practice should be a thoroughgoing effort to disclose everything possible to the people in order to provide an opportunity for informed debate. We do not elect people in the U.S. to protect us from reality, but to represent us in the face of reality. There are very few items of information that really need to be “secret,” and it is demonstrably true that the creation of levels of classification within government increases the secrecy of previously open information.

Companies are not under that regime of disclosure to the same extent, but I believe they benefit from being mostly open. Too often, companies behave as though their secrets are all that keep them from failing in the marketplace, which is really an indicator of how little they concern themselves with the customer's concerns.

Secrecy for secrecy's sake is the indicator that one is keeping too much back from your constituents or your customers.