The Declaration signed by the American Continental Congress on the fourth of July 1776, asserts that "...governments are instituted … to secure … certain unalienable rights [including the rights to] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The theory is that the whole business of government is securing those rights - nothing else. How then can government figures claim that they can keep secret what they are doing to secure those rights - from the very people whose rights they are supposed to be securing?
And how can it make a criminal of someone who tells the people about crimes the government is committing, supposedly to secure those rights?
Secrecy about what the government is doing - and making criminals of those who reveal it - is obviously destructive of at least the liberty, and perhaps the life - certainly the happiness - of those who say what the government is doing. (In a show trial that would have embarrassed the Soviet Union, the Obama administration may now seek the death penalty for a man who revealed US murders.)
Once that has happened, our government has become destructive of the ends of government.
The Declaration asserts unequivocally, "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it."
Even under the 1787 Constitution, the point was uncontested, e.g., "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."