Macrólidos

A London based group that has been campaigning for FOI legislation since 1984. It maintains a website that is full of information on the history and origins of FOI in the UK, and provides the latest updates on FOI developments in Britain – minor amendments, debates on FOI at Whitehall and Holyrood, and FOI in the press,.

A link marked ‘Secrecy Examples’ provides access to a page of links to publications that contain examples of official secrecy. Every year, the CFoI has an annual Freedom of Information Awards ceremony through which it recognized individuals who have campaigned for greater openness, and authorities and companies that have developed initiatives to disclose more information.

Maurice Frankel, directs the CFoI and is a full time campaigner for FOI. The CFoI was founded by Des Wilson (Wilson 1984) and works closely with the CFoI in Scotland.

The United States at the same time also existed in a state of official secrecy, although an OSA was never enacted and calls for access to information and the right to know came much earlier. Throughout

33 _{Ponting pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful disclosure under the 1911 OSA, arguing that releasing the} documents was in the public interest. He was eventually acquitted: while the judge ruled that he was incorrect to interpret the ‘interests of the State’ in section 2 of the OSA as ‘the public interest’, Ponting managed to persuade the jury of the morality of his actions.

34_{In the 1989 OSA the public interest (‘interests of the State’) clause was removed. In addition to its amendment in} 1889, the OSA was also amended in 1920 and 1939. The former affected Section 2 of the OSA and was in response to demands from MI5 to preserve as much of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) as possible, (by amending the Aliens Order (?)). The 1939 amendment did not affect Section 2 since the 1920 amendment was sufficiently all embracing to satisfy MI5, but was confined to Section 1 and affected the practice of journalism in permitting the prosecution of persons who failed to give information about unlawful disclosures. Journalists, in other words, had to name their source! (Hennessy 1989: 356)

both World Wars, it seemed, the American government was also cautious with information and it was largely due to this that there were demands for the American government to be more open post World War Two, in some ways granted in the form of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA) (Roberts 2006) (see introduction). But it was in light of the weakness of the 1946 APA that the 1966 American Freedom of Information Act was conceived, which created and enforced the presumption that all citizens have a right to government records. The route to openness in the US was in many ways much swifter than in Britain, largely due to the absence of an OSA, which in Britain pointed to a more entrenched culture of secrecy making the shift to a culture of openness seem more difficult to accomplish.

However, FOI was not simply about opening the floodgates and letting information out. Decisions over what information should and should not be released had to be carefully considered. As part of a series of Cambridge conferences in late 2006 and early 2007 entitled, Debating the Evidence, The Rt. Hon. Tony Benn, former cabinet secretary Lord Wilson of Dinton, BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall, and Chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission Dr. Hans Blix were invited to talk on Freedom of Information. Delegates and speakers addressed the issues entailed in FOI legislation, balancing perceived benefits against disbenefits. The debate turned out to be a debate about the Iraq war: although rather than discussing whether it should have taken place, the debate was over what kind of information that should have been made available to the public prior, during and after the war, and on what occasion should information be justifiably withheld? How might those responsible for information balance the risks and responsibilities entailed in its disclosure, and strike a balance between secrecy and truth—as if secrecy or truth, knowing or not knowing, were a black and white matter of revelation and concealment?

FOI in Scotland and the UK seemed particularly about unlocking the door of public institutions and letting trapped information out, as well as allowing the public in to scrutinize them. As one FOI Officer for a Scottish local authority remarked as he explained to an audience of civil servant practitioners about what FOI meant, ‘information is trapped within the organisation, and FOI is there to let it out, to make it free’. The image of information trapped within the organization was one that was drawn on by public authorities as well as by those implementing and enforcing the Act to depict its meaning and the use to which it could be put. The U.K. Information Commissioner uses the image of a half-open door as a logo, perhaps to suggest that locked doors are being opened as a result of FOI legislation. The picture, here, is one of information as a trapped person, or prisoner, awaiting release: as if like people, information too is meant to be free.