The government is full of secret and top secret documents. During the 9/11 hearings, many secret documents were declassified by the White House. Had those hearings not been held, the documents would remain a secret. It seems that the government is holding far too many secrets, from scandals like Watergate and Iran Contra to the current invasion of Iraq.
If the government is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people, why don't they trust the people with information about what the government is up to? Sure, there are short periods of time when certain things should remain secret, such as an investigation into a crime before an arrest is made, or planning a military strike on a foe.
But such classified documents need to be declassified as soon as events take place that no longer require them to be secret. After you bomb a country, plans to bomb them no longer need to be secret. Once a person is arrested, the evidence and such no longer need to be secret. Once a president leaves office, whether dead or alive, those records should be released unless they contain information on an impending operation or investigation.
The Freedom of Information Act helps a lot, but it needs to go further.
In the end, I trust Americans with information about terrorist activity more than I trust the government to properly act on that secret information. They hold that information in secrecy to hide their own actions, their own inaction, or to artificially make themselves appear more knowledgeable and valuable than they would be without the secrets.
Yes, there are some secrets that need to be kept, but typically only for a short period of time. Can any piece of information really be secret a year or more after the information was acquired? If no action has taken place on intel or the like after a year, nothing is going to happen.
We saw this with the 9/11 investigation in which it was well known among security professionals in the field that al Qaeda was planning an attack inside the United States, that at least one of them had learned to fly a plane, that the scenario of flying a plane into a building had been discussed (remember, Kamikaze pilots used this technique long ago), and that they knew that al Qaeda had bombs and would like to hijack an airplane. But nobody in government took that information and said we should simply secure the cockpit to avoid hijackings and avoid the scenario of flying the plane into a building. The average person may not have known about these scenarios, but those in the security business did, and unfortunately they didn't tell us any of it because they kept it all a secret.