The ever-increasing global rebellion against secrecy

http://dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2012-09-27-the-ever-increasing-global-rebellion-against-secrecy



Opinionista Julie Reid

The ever-increasing global rebellion against secrecy Julie Reid Julie Reid

Dr Julie Reid is an academic and media analyst at the Department of
Communication Science at the Unisa. She tweets about media issues
regularly from @jbjreid and writes about media policy debates and the
state of media freedom in South Africa. Julie is the Deputy President
of the South African Communications Association (SACOMM), and an
active member of the Right2Know campaign. She is involved in various
media policy research projects, has published research in the field of
media studies and edited a book on South African visual culture.


27 September 2012 06:13 (South Africa)


A furore has developed in South Africa in recent years over citizens'
access to information. The Protection of State Information Bill served
as the catalyst for this, but the debate has turned to broader
concerns over a general preference for secrecy over transparency on
the part of government, access to information and the freedom of
expression.

Many South Africans, especially the younger ones, are unaccustomed to
the notion that as a people we need to engage in a fight to defend our
right to information and our right to say what we like. There is a
collective pinch-me-so-that-I-can-wake-up-from-this-bad-dream feeling,
and I hear them often: comments questioning how it is possible that we
should even need to have these conversations in our democracy. This is
not what was fought for in the struggle, after all. But this coming
Friday marks a day that at very least serves as a reminder that in
this contest, we are not alone.

A decade ago, on 28 September in 2002, a collection of representatives
from freedom of information organisations from around the globe
gathered in Sofia, Bulgaria. They quickly recognised that although
their socio-political contexts may have differed, difficulty in
securing an environment where open access to information was the norm
was a problem in a number of countries around the world. They
established the Freedom of Information Advocates (FOA) Network, a
global coalition to promote open access to information in the interest
of promoting transparent and accountable governments. They also
established 28 September as International Right to Know Day, a day
marked to raise global awareness of the importance of access to
information as a fundamental human right, allowing most especially for
active citizen participation in government.

Things have become even more interesting over the last two years on
the global fight-for-information front. In South Africa, the
Right2Know Campaign gathered speed and support, and accomplished a
surprising degree of mobilisation against the Secrecy Bill from all
sectors of society. The campaign drew widespread support quickly
because of the efficacy of its simple message: We have a right to know
and a right to speak.

Making international news, Julian Assange embarrassed a number of
governments in 2010 by dumping a load of confidential documents on the
WikiLeaks website. (One may have thought Assange's celebrity would
have been assuaged by the rape and molestation charges he faces in
Sweden, and which he seems to be going to ludicrous attempts to avoid
answering, but alas he continues to command a loyal and almost cultish
following as the poster boy for whistleblowers.) The significance and
implications (or non-implications) of the information released by
WikiLeaks in this equation is immaterial. What is important is only
that is was released, and released against the will and without the
permission of various governments. This event fed into the collective
zeitgeist of freedom of information activists and others around the
world, who increasingly began to appreciate the manner in which
Assange gave the middle finger to authorities who would rather have
kept certain information under wraps.

Then last year, on 19 September, two hugely significant events
regarding freedom of information activism happen within a few blocks
of one another in Cape Town. At the Cape Town International Convention
Centre (CTICC) representatives of civil society organisations, global
freedom of information advocates, journalists and academics adopted
the African Platform on Access to Information (APAI) at the closing
session of the Pan African Platform on Access to Information
(http://www.pacaia.org/) conference. This declaration recognised
access to information as a fundamental right and called on all
governments, particularly African ones, to adopt or revise laws in
order to ensure the successful implementation of access to
information. The document pointed out that by 2011 the number of
African countries which had adopted access to information legislation
stood at only 10.

I arrived late at this closing session (but just in time to sign the
declaration) because I had just rushed to the CTICC from a packed out
press conference at the Parliament Building. After months of
deliberations over the Protection of State Information Bill in
Parliamentary committee, increasing pressure from critics and civil
society and a full-scale march on Parliament by the Right2Know
Campaign just two days before, the ANC caucus announced it would stall
the bill, due to be voted on by the National Assembly the following
day, to allow for "further consultations". It was a surprise move, and
one that signalled that the vehement opposition to this particular
piece of legislation had given at least a few people in the ruling
party some serious jitters.

The bill did go to the National Assembly a few months later and was
then referred to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). But while
most expected the NCOP to rubber-stamp the bill without too much
fanfare, the discussions instead resulted in even further concessions
from the ANC. Critics may tell you that even today it is not a great
bill, but the ANC's and Parliament's sometimes nervous and sometimes
blatantly arrogant treatment of this bill has revealed something
significant. At least some people within the ruling party and the
legislature are sensitive to the fact that many South Africans are not
enamoured with the idea of a government that wilfully hides
information that should rightfully be public.

For freedom of information activists, it is important to know that
some in government are aware of this. And on the afternoon of 19
September 2011, in a cramped and crowded press conference, we got
whiff of it for the first time.

Academic and civil society conference circuits are dominated by
conferences convened around themes of access to information, the
freedom of the press and/or freedom of expression and freedom of the
Internet as a conduit for the former two themes. Governments around
the world, nervous of what can be leaked, hacked or exposed on the
Internet, are moving to monitor, regulate and clamp down on Internet
freedoms.

The freedom of access and the exchange of information, which has been
mostly taken for granted since the Internet's inception, is now a
topic of concern as limits have begun to appear in various places.
Open access to information has fast become one of the defining causes
of the current generation, and this global trend seems to be gaining
momentum. The X and Y generations, having grown up in a digital age
and witnessed the rapid expansion of the Internet, are now accustomed
and conditioned to having the information that they want at their
fingertips. Telling these generations that authorities now wish to
clamp down on access to information, or even on Internet freedoms, is
sacrilege because it undermines some of their most formative
experiences of the world.

When a generation has grown up with a particular freedom, whether
freedom to access information or anything else, you cannot expect to
remove that freedom without a rebellion.

While so many citizens around the world feel aggrieved in that they
are denied access to government information in one way or another, one
may become disheartened at the enormity of the predicament. It would
be easy too to shrug this off as the ancient and basic formula of the
nature of human power relations, that those in power do what they can
to remain in power, whether through force, simple government
spin-doctoring or concealing "sensitive" information from citizens.
For a literary experience of this vision of hopelessness, read George
Orwell's novel 1984.

Is it even possible to imagine a situation in which a government is
almost always open and transparent, where government information is
freely accessible to anyone who asks for it, and where secrecy is an
utmost exception instead of being either an official or un-official
norm? It is a good question.

When I visited Stockholm last year I spent some time with a journalist
there who questioned me deeply on the current debates around access to
information and freedom of expression in South Africa. As I began to
explain some of the more complicated details of the debates I could
tell she was confused. I paused and she expressed her dismay. From our
conversation it occurred to me that our situation was simply
unfathomable to her because of her own context: in Sweden (whether
accurately or inaccurately) the idea of a non-transparent government
is literally a foreign concept to most people. Where a lack of
corruption and transparency seem to be good bed mates, Sweden rates
among the top five countries in the world on Transparency
International's 2011 Corruptions Perceptions Index, along with
Finland, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand. So, maybe, it is possible.

When it comes to considering of how much information should be made
available to citizens, governments have some options. They can follow
the same route as countries like Sweden and embrace citizen
participation in governance and transparency, and resultantly
disenable corruption. They can invent reasons for keeping information
secret, which (if cleverly done) usually involves making the citizenry
afraid of some mythical foreign enemy and providing justifications of
"national security". Maybe this was the ANC's problem all along: South
Africans aren't afraid enough of foreign spies/invaders to buy the
whole "national security" selling point on the Secrecy Bill.

If governments don't care for meaningful citizen participation in
governance and are arrogant enough to be unconcerned with looking
legitimate, a third (and most scary) option arises: put the state boot
of oppression on the necks of the people who demand their right to
know.

In South Africa the Right2Know Campaign, intends to mark International
Right to Know Day on 28 September by marching through the streets of
the capital city to the Union Buildings. DM


--
- Urvashi Sharma
Right to Information Helpline 8081898081
Helpline Against Corruption 9455553838
http://yaishwaryaj-seva-sansthan.hpage.co.in/