I wonder if any game theorists have thought about whether a country with no secrets could be militarily stronger.
It's similar to the Linux vs Windows debate: at first glance it seems ludicrous that an open source OS could be more secure than a closed source OS. But with enough eyes and enthusiasts, all problems are quickly fixed.
A small inner-circle who have access to the inner workings may find it hard to compete when their competitor has the whole world helping debug and fix the system, including the goodwill associated with that.
Sure they have. IANA game theorist, but I think the conclusion is that some secrets are good, but the paramaters should generally be communicated.
You didn't want to let the USSR know how many nukes you had (or they could come up with a stronger first strike plan). But you wanted them to know roughly how many, so they knew not to overreact (and build a massive deterrent to an overstated threat), or under-react (and get too cocky).
There's also value in giving biased paramaters - the President is mad, and you have more nukes than they think (which will make them scared, and more likely to back down, because they think they are dealing with an irrational actor), but you don't want to sail too close too the wind here.
The thing is, game theorists don't deal well with stuff that's not part of game theory. Game theory tends to assume that actors are all very smart, and aren't hamstrung by some of their best advisors being out of the loop.
The "military secrets" to "source code" isn't an apt analogy. Lots of Linux OSs have secrets, such as SSL private keys, ssh private keys, passwords that sort of thing. Those are like military/government secrets. A (windows or linux) server that told everyone what the ssl private key and root passwords were, would, obviously, not be secure/
I'm not sure if that analogy works. Wouldn't a country with no secrets like an organization whose source code is open AND all of whose encryption keys are public?
Yes. And they also know that too many secrets makes a country militarily weaker. An example scenario, a intelligence professional comes across information that pertains to a plot to kill his co-worker that was collected in a way that is highly classified that he can't warn his colleague (with a lower clearance) about it.
It's similar to the Linux vs Windows debate: at first glance it seems ludicrous that an open source OS could be more secure than a closed source OS. But with enough eyes and enthusiasts, all problems are quickly fixed.
A small inner-circle who have access to the inner workings may find it hard to compete when their competitor has the whole world helping debug and fix the system, including the goodwill associated with that.