Secret society

On The Panel last night, some dork who's going up against John Howard in Bennelong was droning on. I was nodding off. Australian politics is duller than a gurgling drain and this guy was one of its lowlights. He was buggering on about government secrecy.

Of course you do have to keep secrets in the national interest, he said. The reason? It's the law.

Hang on, I thought. The law is not the reason you have to keep secrets, the need for secrets is the reason for the law!

But this kind of thinking is prevalent. You must not kill because murder is illegal. Well, you must not get caught killing because murder is illegal. But it's illegal because, presumably, it's wrong.

The woolly thinking that allows you to think that a thing is wrong just because it's illegal allows the opposite thought: things are not wrong if they're not illegal. So if I whack my neighbour over the head with a plank, that's illegal and therefore wrong; but if I do it with a B52, that's okay.

The guy had the good grace to look shamefaced and sputtered out some bullshit about not wanting others to know our "technical capability", but the truth is that the government keeps secrets because it does things it doesn't want others to know about. Often, those others are the public.

I once had to sign the Official Secrets Act, which in the UK binds you to keep the government's dirty secrets, and even now I'm committing a criminal offence by revealing the secret in question. I worked as a dogsbody on a survey that worked to find out whether service personnel who had been stationed at places such as Maralinga had suffered cancer at higher rates than those who had been stationed at places with similar climates at similar latitudes. Even saying I worked on it, by the way, is a breach of the act.

It was shitwork, but it did throw light into the lives of the servicemen, and showed me something interesting: many, many more cancers for the guys at Maralinga etc. Alarmingly so.

The survey concluded otherwise. It would have been easy to bury the results. All we did was make piles and I think check off sheets. Even if anyone had had access to the survey data, which they wouldn't -- it was secret, remember -- it was pathetically easy to falsify: shift a few records, lose or change a few sheets (they weren't even prenumbered or anything). Our work had to be "checked", of course, anyway.

It's nothing we don't know. Governments lie. They lie in their teeth for all sorts of reasons. I'm an advocate of open government, freedom of information, what have you. I know that you don't catch too many Al Qaeda guys that way, and that is a real stumbling block for open government. But too often, the gov't uses the measures it has passed or claims are necessary to combat bad buys on the good guys (or at least the neutral guys, if you will). The solution? Probably we do need a covert organisation. One. Not the proliferation we, and other countries, currently indulge in. It should be tightly controlled by outside agencies, who are accountable and are not part of the gov't. At the moment, the UK's secret services are accountable only to the gov't of the day, which does not offer protection to the citizens.

Don't ask me for the details. Another problem woolly thinkers struggle with is the idea that they don't actually have to have an answer to everything.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:57 am