The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government - sometimes - is to keep stuff secret. There's a natural tension there.
Governments want to control information. To do this, they have elaborate systems for promoting themselves via propaganda departments and for ensuring confidentiality with official-secrets laws. There are good reasons for these: people need information, and national security deserves secrecy.
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.
We can't make any statements here. We can't talk about the internal politics of Paraguay.
You do not walk into any hearing or committee meeting and reveal confidential communications with the president of the United States, who's entitled to receive confidential communications in your best judgment about a host of issues.
Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?
The law does not distinguish terribly well between real secrets and sort-of secrets, especially in an age when the instinct to stamp “classified” runs rampant.
[Defining state secrets:] All state affairs which have not yet been decided upon, or which have been decided upon but not yet been made public.
The information I received as a member of the National Security Council, in my capacity as Vice—President, was so confidential that I would lose my right arm before I divulge it to anyone, even to members of my own family…
Is there any way we can know that claims of state secrecy are in fact being used to protect the national security rather than to conceal the abuse of authority?
Some information has to remain in the privy of the office of the Prime Minister and the ministers for the proper administration of government.
I was arrested on suspicion of breach of Official Secrets Act in March 2003, but they didn't charge me until November. Now, the in-between months, I was bailed and re-bailed, and my life was on standstill. I was in limbo. It was a difficult time for me and my family, because we just did not know what the future held for us.
The Bureau doesn't have any secret files.
So far as the Constitution goes .. the press is free to do battle against secrecy and deception in government. But the press cannot expect from the Constitution that they will succeed…. The Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act or an Official Secrets Act.
