A great country that is a source of freedom, liberty, and justice for the people is that of which its governance makes it to be their principle to be transparent and accountable to the people. For that to happen, it must conduct its most important policies in the open, so they can be debated and discussed, so the people know what is happening on their behalf and can leave their imprint on it.
This signifies that any nation that makes it their point, that to govern and to protect the people, it needs an inordinate amount of secret institutions, that are not accountable to the people, that are not open to the people, and are hence not transparent to the people, quite obviously makes it susceptible of doing things in secret, that the people would not countenance if they were to know the extent of it. While it is true, that there are those situations such as in warfare, that necessitate secrecy, in addition to secrecy having its place when it comes to protecting vital interests of the nation, there needs to be at a minimum, measured discretion, which does not mean nor does it signify, that secrecy should be the go to option of those in government, but rather it should be used selectively as well as still being accountable to those that are the representatives of the people, and thus should never be an operation that is essentially running on its own, and answerable only to those that are the ones that actuated it in the first place.
Indeed, the more secrets that a given governance has and keeps, the less free the people are. Additionally, secrecy is quite obviously the place for governance to do all sorts of things that they would not dare attempt if it were ever to become public knowledge, typically not because it would hurt true national security, but rather because the powers that be of those secrets desire to be able to do nefarious or underhanded things that they would reasonably expect would not meet with universal public approval.
The government that leads us should itself be a paragon of virtue and right action, best proved by being open with the people, and thus subject to review and approval. On the other hand, secrecy, depending upon how many layers of secrecy there are, becomes a dynamic in which the left hand might not know what the right hand is doing, and the principles behind such secrecy in the first place are often forgotten, changed, or ignored. Further to the point, in absence of effective oversight or strong shields to prevent bad acts being done under the color of secrecy, which thereby undercuts the very essence of what American values are, there needs to be robust rules in place to reduce considerably that which is permitted to be secret, and all those institutions that are currently structured as secret, should be thoroughly audited as to the reason why, and ultimately accountable to representatives of the people in a way and manner that when something secret needs to be curtailed, that those representatives can curtail it, or else this nation has, in essence, permitted secrecy to trump democratic values.