Secrets

A few weeks ago (20th October) a piece in the DT by Charles Moore caught my eye, a piece wailing about the destructive effect on the permanent record of the Freedom of Information Act. A piece which irritated me at the time because it did not appear to recognise the complementary evil of excessive secrecy which brought on the act, quite possibly badly flawed, in the first place.

Excessive secrecy which I once read was brought on by the habits of empire learned in India. There might have been a few thousand whites ruling a few hundred million browns but the general idea was that the browns were not fit people to know about the machinery of government. Everything written down by government whites was to be kept secret from the browns, whether government browns or the common or garden sort. These habits then percolated back to the home country, habits which were reinforced by returning whites being used to staff up the various agencies which look after our security. Amongst other nonsenses this resulted in the one that meant, for example, that government X would energetically deny that it was even thinking about proposal Y, a proposal being forcefully promoted by Clan Murdoch, in the context of the upcoming budget. Which always seemed a bit silly to me: governments were paid to think about options and proposal Y was clearly one of them, even if government X happened to prefer (without actually saying at this point) proposal Z. Part of the whole budget secrecy nonsense: I grant that the the announcement of some decisions has to be carefully controlled, but that is nowhere near enough to justify to huge paraphernalia of budget secrecy - at least it was huge in the days when I had distant sight of such things. I think they are slowly getting more sensible. In the meantime, reinforcement is provided by document classification machismo: my document has a higher classification (that is to say that it is more secret) than yours. Which results in a strong tendency to over classify things. In which connection I remember the chap who wrote a document which was so machismo that he was not allowed to put his own name on the circulation list at the head of the document, circulation lists which, I might say, are strictly in descending order of rank. None of this ladies first or alphabetical stuff here thank you. An arrangement which might sound a bit silly but which I think is actually quite sensible. Again, going back to the point in hand, one can dream up bizarre circumstances where not putting one's own name to one's own document is sensible, but I do not think that this particular circumstance was one of them.

Reading Moore again, I am much less irritated. I recognise his concerns about the permanent record - which used to be expressed in the files - even if I think he puts more blame on freedom of information than I would. Files used to be controlled and carefully maintained objects. They were manilla folders containing all the papers about this or that subject, tied together by that important contribution to office efficiency in the world at large known as a Treasury tag (and sold in Rymans to this day, albeit in plastic), manilla folders which were numbered and tracked. One knew where the thing was at any point in time, knowledge which was important in the era before photocopiers and computers when these arrangements were developed. Important files had an index at the front. Important officials wrote manuscript notes in them using expensive fountain pens. Ministers were allowed to use green ink; practically treason for a mere official to use such stuff. The point of all this being that if you were the lead official for this or that subject you made sure that the file told the story. You did not include every twist and turn of the conversation, but you did try to construct a true and useful record so that if you - or anybody else for that matter - went back to it in years to come you would get back a true sense of how and why something was done. The file really did tell the story. It was also true that keeping all these files in decent shape absorbed a huge amount of energy and as photocopying and computers came in, the point of the file as the one central record of what was going on went out. With the result that the quality of files fell off - whether in paper form or the electronic form we have now. And in the present climate of efficiency and cuts I can't see them ever falling on again. We will just have huge computer files containing huge amounts of raw information with no-one being given the time to turn all this stuff into a coherent story. But at least that will keep researchers of the future out of mischief while they sort it all out. And they won't be able to find too many embarrassing needles in the haystack - so all this freedom of information will have been of no avail.

Freedom of information has also added the further twist that people are getting nervous about appearing in the record. And if one adds emails to the mix, you have lots of important people saying unguarded or slipshod things about important matters. Sayings which are fine at the time but which do not look always too clever after the event. And these sayings are very easy to file; indeed it is quite hard to remove all trace of an email from a computer system and it might well be illegal in certain circumstances: tampering with the record very serious matter... So Moore has a point to this extent: important people might stop committing themselves to email and to that extent there would be no record. At least in the olden days you got a digest of what they said - if only under the anonymizing rubric of  'the following points were made in discussion'. With the foregoing 'at least' not really being appropriate: a digest is usually a lot more useful than a transcript.

But you do have to trust the digester. So we are back once again to 'quis custodiet custodes ipsos' (see Juvenal, Satire VI, lines 347-8).