The above quote comes from the inestimable, Lord Acton, in which the full quote reads as follows: "Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity." As true as this was back when it was first written, we find that in this hi-tech era of our intrusive government and its agencies being able to watch and to document with what seems to be virtual impunity, all that is occurring within its own domestic borders and therefore such being directed against its own citizens, and subsequently of which that government is reluctant to divulge such to the full extent of, and thereby hides behind what has been classified as being secret, so as to therefore conceal its intrusive actions behind the door of national security, we are thereby left to suffer the inherent dangers, thereof, of secrets so hidden.
As Lord Acton, so wrote, nothing truly is safe, if that which is being done, even ostensibly for the benefit of the people, is not subject to public discussion and thereby publicized for what it really is. Sure, no doubt, there are those things and areas that the government is involved in, which legitimately necessitates some degree of secrecy and discretion, but this has over time, relentlessly become bastardized into becoming a government in which the salient point of all these secrets, as well as their outright deceptions and misdirection, is to preclude the public from really knowing what is actually going on, and to quite obviously suppress the full disclosure of actions so taken that are of questionable merit, of questionable legality, and of questionable purpose, so as to protect those government officials and their actions from being held accountable to such.
When any government, is permitted to hide what it is really doing, so as to essentially do what it is not permitted to do by any reasonable interpretation of its own Constitution, than that government is quite clearly no longer a government of, for, and by the people; but rather it is a government that marches instead to its own desires, rules, and interpretations that protects what it is doing, under the cover of a secrecy, which is unpublicized, un-divulged, and un-debated.
So too, the more that is gathered and then secreted away from the public purview, the more such is going to involve that which is clearly wrong and at odds with what this country should really represent; for those that are devilish in their desires are the very ones that know that in order to keep doing what they so do, they need to keep it secret. This thus signifies, that almost by definition, the more secretive a government is, the more it is up to no good; and further to the point the more that a government insists that it needs to keep things secret so as to uphold national security, means almost for a certainty, that it is up to no good.
The bottom line is that while discretion and secrecy have their necessary place; there never has been a time when there should be less secrecy than today, because in this hi-tech world of massive amounts of data information so being accumulated, sorted and analyzed, the citizens of this country have a right to know what is being done to them and supposedly for them on their behalf, and thereby to see that those that spend so much time and energy watching and monitoring them, are in turn, answerable in full to those citizens, who are the ones who instituted that government in the first place.