What To Keep Secret, Or What Not To Keep Secret

As I wrote in an earlier post back in December, I do not believe in the absolute right to openess, the right to know anything about everything and vice versa. Sometimes, the masses benefit from more ignorance, from not knowing certain things, but secure in the blissful hope that someone somewhere does know and is doing something about it. Without this seemingly naive state of mind, a man for his worries would lose his sanity. That is why, when I visited the Guardian website this morning I was filled with apprehension when I saw this article by the eminent and admirable historian Thimothy Garton Ash on this subject.

I was struck by this slight feeling of dread because the Guardian was one of the main publishers of the Wikileaks troves of the often useless but sometimes profoundly significant state secrets. With this in mind I expected mr. Garton Ash to be true to Guardian form and call for the absolutism of transparency. And to some degree he does, praising the new OpenLeaks website set up by a former WikiLeaks member. But the gross part of his article is a call for a new paradigm in how organisations, both government and private, handle and classify secrets. He writes that everybody has secrets:

I know of no organisation in the world that is 100% transparent. Everyone has something they want to hide – and some things they can reasonably argue that they are justified in hiding. Often the two do not exactly coincide. Witness, for example, the hilarious spectacle of Julian Assange protesting furiously at leaks from inside WikiLeaks.

 So it is indeed.

Mr. Garton Ash goes on to suggest to principles in what should be kept secret and what shouldn't.

First, be open about your grounds for secrecy, transparent about your non-transparency. Have clear criteria and be ready to defend them. They should be able to withstand the following, somewhat paradoxical test: if this piece of information became public, could you credibly explain why it should not have become public? ... My second guiding principle is: protect less, but protect it better. There is a vast amount of stuff that governments and organisations keep secret for no good reason.

 As the WikiLeaks hoopla proved - and Sir Humphry in Yes, Minister would have approved of - governments keep secrets that are so unsensitive that they should have been published just to amuse the population and put some second rate comedians out of a job. If, instead, the Garton-Ash principles were to be applied than we would be surer that what is secret is secret for a reason and not simply because the for-presidents-eyes-only stamp hadn't yet been used that morning. I doubt anything will change soon, but the suggestions made in the article are very interesting indeed, and deserve further consideration.