Monday, June 16, 2008
How Not to Keep Secrets
Melanie Phillips hints at the sheer oddity of the all these secret files being lost and then found by the media. This has puzzled me. Were I to leave some papers on a train I would assume they would be thrown away by the cleaners or, if I was very very lucky, they might turn up as lost property. Say one thousand documents are left on trains, I would guess 900 of them would never been found and the remainder might be successfully retrieved. But all these documents are found, recognised and passed on to the media. Or, of course, these found documents are just a small proportion of the thousands lost every year. Given these these appear to be obviously secret and important, the actual proportion recognised might be more than 10 per cent. But say it is twenty per cent. That still suggests officials are routinely losing telephone director-sized volumes of sensitive material. If this is not the case and all the secret documents that are being lost are being found and not by the loser, then, I'm afraid, something funny must be going on. Or not funny at all in view of the fact that our allies would now be crazy to trust us with anything.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The strange thing for me is that these things always get handed in to the media - not e.g. railway authorities, police, nearest government office - and nearly always to papers of the right. Papers incriminating George Galway were, of course, found on top of the first packing-case opened in Saddam's office - and handed in immediately to the Telegraph (and later found to be fakes).
ReplyDeleteParanoid? Who said that?
Pete B
i'm sure John le Carre will coin a good phrase for the technique by which papers are 'lost' on a train and then end up in a newspaper's office.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the spooks are using overhead racks as dead letter drops?
ReplyDeleteMight be that they really stamp TOP SECRET onto the things. They might have a special department to make the stickers for the CD's. Mind you what will the 'papers do if/when they start using the sticks.
ReplyDeleteyours etc
Vince
Listen people, don't rattle the bars of their cage over this one, think it through, they may lose the cabinet.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the 'TOP' in TOP SECRET is an acronym: Tip-Off Press.
ReplyDeleteNot really that strange. Material like this has value, so it is picked up and acted on rather than thrown out. It's unlikely that a diamond necklace found on a seat would be thrown away either.
ReplyDeleteIt sound pretty low-level stuff; a hundred different think-tanks could have come up with a similar assessment. And if our bureaucrats are reading it, you can be sure their bureaucrats are reading the same kind of thing too.
Still, there are more interesting "secrets" such as the activities of Pakistan's intelligence services or the whereabouts of Bin Liner and the humiliating failure of the US to slot him.
all I've got to say, Mr. A, is if you found a ball of wool would you try knit yourself a sweater?
ReplyDeleteHee, hee -- a London pal of mine (we play Scrabble online) was recently lamenting that it will no longer be legal to drink on trains in Jolly Olde. Perhaps this is why!
ReplyDeleteIt's almost like... they wanted the files to be found! I don't like it. Smells fishy. This thing goes deep, I tell you! Bryan! Look out, behind you! He's got a gun!
ReplyDeleteI left some A Level scripts on a train once and they were handed in. The only problem was that someone had taken the trouble to 'mark' every page of the 50 or so papers. Sadly, terms such as 'wanker', 'you thick twat' and 'complete failure' were not part of the mark scheme. It took some explaining, I can tell you.
ReplyDelete