The “Protection of Information Bill 6 of 2010” (or whatever it is called) is currently being steamrollered through our legislative system. This act says that state information must be protected, and lays out all sorts of sanctions for those who expose the state’s secrets (or the party’s dirty laundry, or whatever). Now, this brings up an interesting point: why is protecting your information my problem?
In the good old days, protected information was placed in a dossier with a stamp like “CLASSIFIED”, and only those who had signed the official secrets act would be allowed to look at it. There were measures to prevent this information from blowing out of the window and into the hands of the masses. If someone had the temerity to agree to protect state secrets, and then later expose classified content to the masses, they could hang for treason (or face some other unpleasant punishment). The point is that in times gone by, the state could find people to trust to keep secrets, and place guards with guns to shoot people it didn’t trust.
But now, in South Africa 2012: the state has given up all pretence of having officials that have integrity. An official may agree to keep secrets safe, but the state knows that their officials have no intention of keeping their promises.
Since the state’s officers cannot protect their information, the state would like someone new to protect their information: YOU. If you happen to find the state’s classified information blowing in the wind, or being spoken freely in public, or being chatted about on the internet, or published on billboards, or between the lines in the news, then you must (on pain of nasty punishments) keep it entirely to yourself (please). The state has given up the notion that it will protect its own information. It has proclaimed its loss of confidence in the public service. You are the last line of defence against a curious public finding out that yet another incompetent murderous adulterous fraudster has been promoted to a top post, over the objections of his properly qualified peers.
How will you know that you have published protected state information? That’s easy: it’s not that it will be in a clearly marked “classified” dossier, or printed on a particular type of paper; it’s not that it will be delivered to you in the dead of night by a shadowy spy who obtained it by craft: no, you will know that you have published protected state information when your front and back doors simultaneously disintegrate into fine powder, and you are dragged off to prison wondering what it is all about.
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
(Until you publish, that is.)
