In many ways the Freedom of Information Act was a response to the inevitable. Information is held almost entirely electronically, and as such is volatile, easily and rapidly disseminated, and tends to be leaky. It’s also harder to dress things up – just think of the difficulty that the combined might of the US and British Establishment has faced over the WMD myth and how quickly the “dodgy dossier” was rumbled (and how quickly the game got nasty). There is more information out there than we can imagine. Supermarkets may know rather more about customers’ shopping (and consequently even about their lives behind closed doors) than the customers suspect. Web sites set “cookies” and use other devices to track visitors, what they do and where they come from. As well as knowing our age, incomes and the property transactions in our neighbourhoods, banks know how we spend our money, how we settle our bills and so on. Satellite tracking of cars or mobile phones, and personal ID cards may follow. Big Brother is watching you. But you can also, up to a point anyway, watch Big Brother.
Long ago when I lived in Kuwait the Palestinian clerk at the office where each month I handed over my rent (in cash of course) – a transaction which normally involved tea, discussions about families, politics and life in general – told me that it was always better to tell the truth because that way “you could remember what you said”; rarely has virtue been more pragmatically underpinned by experience. Today free information exposes things to a bright light. In commerce, as in politics, bluff is quickly exposed, hype is quickly made to look absurd, statements quickly checked against facts, and falsehoods quickly revealed for what they are. Hence the success of the “blog” as one of the elements of the Internet that competes with other traditional media. Because anybody can start a blog (and anybody does) a blog needs, of course, to have something to offer in terms of subject matter or style or current relevance or angle. And integrity. Indeed, for a given blog to be successful rather than dismissed as the work of a crank or just a waste of time it needs to subscribe to a culture of what we might call “brutal honesty”.
There is today a sharp division between those who prop up an old fashioned, largely discredited and untenable model of information management, who typically and habitually mark things as being “confidential”, who hold meetings and ask those present not to reveal what was said, who send “blind copies” of messages for personal advantage and so on, and those who understand and encourage the new transparency. Of course some things are sensitive, and private or restricted, and not for dissemination – but they are the exception and that is not what we’re talking about here. The battle is between those who work with a combination of secrecy, declared positions and spin, and those who share and even thrive in this brave new world.
Click here for more things that don’t work.
