Which of the following should the State be allowed to keep secret from it's citizens?

Many of these (like health records and salaries) I don't think the government should even have access to. I marked all of those. I interpreted "details of security investigations" to mean the findings, not the fact that those people are being investigated.

Many of these things should be private from the government - ie: the government shouldn't have health records of individuals.

I really liked this question at the top, and even halfway down, but then it got a little confusing. "Ownership of companies should be allowed to be confidential"..so does checking the box mean yes it should? But the question is which should the State keep a secret?

Format aside, I think that there are circumstances when it is simply the lesser of two evils to keep things secret. Having said that, I think that there are many things currently kept secret for no good reason other than to protect individuals rather than society in general, and that is not a legitimate reason to do so.

The four confidential options differed in that they are not classic "state secrets". At the very least the people involved would know the information, my intention was that a checked box would prohibit the State from revealing that information to other people besides the people who the information relates to.

Second as technology increases the government is going to become privy to more and more information. Before I went into government service, for example; I had a complete physical, and my medical records were turned over to the government. Should freedom of information type actions cause the government to release that information about me.

Recently freedom for information act papers were filed for the FBI file of Frank Sinatra. These were filed by a trashy TV news-magazine. Should the government be forced to reveal this information to others besides Frank Sinatra. Thus confidentiality varies enough from secrecy that I felt the need to differentiate those options.

I'd like to try a world where there are no secrets. I'm not sure it would work, but I suspect it would, and many problems would evaporate.

One thing that I find most interesting is that the government can discover identity of a body from dental records, this of course means that dentists send their records to a central facility for recording and storage. I don't remember authorizing this. (Of course I could just be jumping at shadows.)

jjg: I think that it is more likely that once someone has been listed as missing their dental records are then forwarded along to some authority rather than everyones records being reported.

Many of these should be kept secret from the government in the first place.

I'm not sure just what you mean by salaries, health records, etc. I'd prefer that they were kept confidential, but the government shouldn't force them to be. An individual thing, perhaps.

The government gets hold of information, such as health information from medicare claims, income information from tax returns; should the government be required to reveal that information to it's citizenry or should it remain confidential.

My answers depend on circumstances. Also, I'm not sure if "secret" here means "not shared with everyone" or "not shared with anyone."
I chose to check anything where I could imagine a situation where the State could legitimately not make this public knowledge; so I checked almost all of them. However, for most of these I think in most cases there's no legitimate reason to keep them secret.

bill - yeah, me too.

By the way, just for the record, the possessive pronoun is "its," the word you used is a contraction meaning, "it is." I am really surprised one of our resident Grammar Queens hasn't helped you out with this little tid-bit.

topper: None of the grammar queens (hunter, steve, elijahblue...) have commented though.

Who has time to speak proper English anymore?

topper, *POOF* you are now a Grammar Queen!

Right now we hide things "which, if released, could cause harm to the US government". I'd modify that to hide things which, if released, would cause greater harm to an individual or individuals than would be caused to individuals by not releasing it.