Upsides and Downsides to More Governmental Information

Whether there should be more transparency and information available about the government is a topic that is always being discussed. I know even just on the Northeastern level, there was concern raised by some students when SGA President Ryan Fox made certain formerly public finance meetings private last semester. I'm not fully informed on the situation, and I don't remember what the reasoning behind this decision was, but many students were angry and felt that it was their right to know how their tuition and student activity fees were being spent. I couldn't help but wonder if students only felt this way because they previously had access to this type of information and now they didn't. I wonder if those meetings had always been private, if anyone would have questioned it. I also wonder how many people actually ever attended and were active at these meetings. This "scandal" probably attracted the attention of one hundred times as many non-SGA students that regularly attended the open meetings because it was in the newspaper. Most students probably didn't even know or care about these meetings until now. I think that having more information from the government will only please people if it's what they want to hear. The Online Town Hall meetings appear to be a very effective way for politicians to talk to their constituents, and they are very mindful of what they are saying, I'm sure. In a different vein, it did no favors for government officials like Hillary Clinton when the WikiLeaks document dump happened, and many statements she wasn't expecting the public to hear were suddenly in everyone's faces. Even in work environments, people say things they wouldn't want publicly attributed to them all the time, especially when they think what they're saying is in confidence. The information released during WikiLeaks was unfortunate, in my opinion. I'm sure most, if not all, of Clinton's predecessors said unprofessional things about other world leaders, but because it wasn't in this age of technology, we don't know about it. It's not to say that our governemental leaders should be able to say whatever they want without us knowing about it, but they still deserve a certain level of privacy and should be able to trust a small number of internal people to be able to speak candidly with them.