From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:
Note that secrecy abuses, during the Bush years, weren’t spoken of as a mere side issue or bad policy option, but rather as a fundamental threat to democracy itself. That’s certainly how I constantly wrote of secrecy abuses during the Bush years: secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, and transparency is the paramount tool against it.
As Obama himself put it the day after he was inaugurated: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.”