The idea that states should have the capability to keep secrets from their citizens often seems to be taken for granted. Clearly there are cases where states should be able to keep secrets (it is doubtful, for instance, that the allied powers would have won the second world war if the cracking of the German Enigma code had not been kept secret). But lately I've been of the opinion that this privilege should be extremely limited, and should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances.
From Wikileaks, we have learned that states are keeping things secret even when it is not in the interests of citizens or justice for those things to be secret. Sometimes these secrets are kept to protect special interests, or to avoid embarrassment to those in power. Keeping such things secret is antithetical to informed democracy.
I would like to see a system of checks and balances to avoid abuse of state secrets. Wikileaks forms (informally) one such check - as long as they redact things that really do need to be kept secret (for example information that would reveal the identities of undercover operatives). As far I have been able to tell they have done this. However, it does require individual leakers to put their careers (and sometimes even their very freedom) in jeopardy and can therefore only go so far alone. A good additional balance would be to make it illegal for the government to withhold information from the public without good reason. Then if something is leaked which reveals that secrets have been kept unjustifiably, the secret-keepers could be prosecuted on that basis.
An alternative (or complementary) approach would be for a (trusted) third party to hold on to all government information, and to publicly release all the information that doesn't need to be kept secret. Determining which is which isn't free, so there would need to be some kind of penalty for revealing information which endangers operatives. Then, to prevent this organization from just redacting everything there would need to be an economic incentive to release as much (non-endangering) information as possible. Then there would have to be some process for keeping these rates properly tuned to avoid too much information being withheld or released. This tuning process would have to be done with public input (to make sure the balance doesn't swing too far one way or the other) but can't be done by the normal government (or there would be too much temptation to just turn the secrecy level way up). So it essentially needs to be made a whole new branch of government, with that responsibility and no other. Tricky.