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Jakarta Post

Secrecy bill meant to shut people up

The original drafters of the state secrecy bill say that both legislators and the executive branch have ruined the bill by turning it into a weapon to limit public access to information

The Jakarta Post (The Jakarta Post)
Fri, July 31, 2009

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Secrecy bill meant to shut people up

T

he original drafters of the state secrecy bill say that both legislators and the executive branch have ruined the bill by turning it into a weapon to limit public access to information.

"The original name of the bill was the *strategic information protection bill'. We made the bill based on the spirit of protecting the country's strategic information when we designed it," one of the original drafters, Kusnanto Anggoro, said during a discussion Thursday.

"We then sent the bill to the House. After a while, we found out that the bill's substance and content were slowly being altered. Gradually the bill's content got worse and worse and it became totally different from the original," Kusnanto, who is also an intelligence expert from the University of Indonesia (UI), added.

Kusnanto's fellow drafter and UI colleague, Makmur Keliat, said the original bill only included national security-related information as confidential.

"However, the latest draft includes public information as confidential," he said.

Previous discussions on the bill found that general information, such as the state budget and how it is allocated are now categorized as confidential.

Section 6A Clause 1-J to 1-M states that state secrecy information includes "any information related to budgeting and spending allocations and government assets for the purpose of national security".

Makmur also said that the latest draft contains a lot of loopholes, which could be exploited by corrupt state officials.

"There should a clearer mechanism, such as the separation of responsibility between the officials who have access to confidential information and those who use the information," he said.

Makmur said that he also doubted the state's capability to keep and manage confidential information, even if the bill was passed into law.

A senior journalist from Kompas, Budiarto Shambazy, said that Makmur's doubts were reasonable, and recent events demonstrate that high ranking state officials are not greatly commitment to keeping secrets to themselves.

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