Thorough asessment of the state's secret information bill

Ali Abdullah Wibisono ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 06/05/2008 1:14 AM  |  Opinion

The ongoing deliberations over the controversial state secrecy bill have pitted the government, the bill's supporter, against a group of civil society organizations (CSOs), the bill's opponents.

The CSOs claim approval of the bill will mean an end to freedom of information. They say the existing public information transparency law is more than sufficient to protect confidential state information.

On the other hand, the government is touting the bill as an opportunity to secure whatever information they consider important to national security from public scrutiny and also from intervention by other state institutions. The House has asked the government to revise the draft bill, so now the question is what key points should the government keep intact in the next draft?

Both the government and the CSOs have failed to capture the essence of what the law should regulate. Secrecy can only be applied to information that affects the country's strategic interests, and which therefore require specialized management of its access and protection.

Such information can be grouped into three classes. First, defense and security, which comprise military plans, weapons systems and military operations.

Second, foreign relations, which comprise information on foreign governments and foreign information sources.

Third, intelligence, which comprises information on intelligence activities, intelligence sources, intelligence methods and cryptology. Taken in the context of these three categories, we can agree on several points crucial to secret information regulation.

First, rather than abolishing freedom to acquire public information, a regulation on secret information should ideally be intended to protect it. In other words, such a regulation should not be detrimental to citizens' right to acquire information.

Rather, the regulation should be an instrument which limits the extent to which government can apply secrecy of information, by limiting the scope of secret information and obliging the government to establish proper management of information without which secrecy would be meaningless.

Second, current regulations are no substitute for a state secrecy regulation. Keep in mind at the heart of this regulation is not just the intention to block certain types of information from public view, but more importantly to prevent them falling into the wrong hands.

Marking information "confidential", "secret" or "top secret" must entail serious government efforts to protect it properly. These efforts are still absent from both the public information transparency law and latest draft of the state secrecy bill.

Rather than protect information sensitive to national security, the current secrecy bill, drawn up by the National Encryption Body (LSN), may well prove detrimental to public access to information. The content of the bill may also cause bureaucratic tie-ups among government institutions.

Third, we must remember the state secrecy regulation will be and should be enacted through the House rather than through the government. This means the resulting law will be an instrument for society as a whole. It will monitor the government's handling of state secrets and related protection mechanisms, thereby avoiding abusive over-secrecy or, at the other extreme, lack of protection for strategic information.

The government needs to change its perspective on the state secret regulation. Rather than perceiving the regulation as merely an instrument for labeling information secret, the government must work hard to set up a rigorous protection mechanism for information sensitive to national strategic interests.

The government is obliged to prevent foreign individuals or organizations from seeking to gain from Indonesia's inability to exert effective sovereign control upon its resources, including valuable information. But Indonesians have the right to unhindered access to public information.

There are at least three principles the next state secrecy bill must include.

Protective mechanisms are required to limit access to certain strategic information. This can be accomplished in several ways, including security clearance, non-disclosure agreements and a comprehensive information management system that prevents information from leaking to the public.

Also, the public must be allowed to argue against certain information being classified as secret. Democratic nations always provide mechanisms to test a policy in terms of retention period, classification and declassification. Classification of information must be based on a precedence which shows a disclosure of that information would compromise national security.

Finally, the bill must address declassification mechanisms to bring information back into the public domain, either because its retention period is over or because of strong public demand to declassify the information. This mechanism is important to prevent abuse of state secrecy on information.

One point which must be clarified is the difference between protecting strategic information to limit who can access it, and simply classifying information as secret.

The first would imply a necessity to establish a comprehensive information management system that would require sophisticated encryption of strategic information. But the second would simply imply closure of access to certain information without due consideration of the content of such information, which would easily lead to an abuse of power on the part of the government in hiding any information they want from public view.

The writer is a lecturer at the University of Indonesia's International Relations Department. He can be reached at ali_wibisono81@yahoo.co.uk.

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