The film Official Secrets, on BBC2 at 10.00pm on Easter Monday and iPlayer for 30 days afterwards, is timely. It deals with issues that are at the heart of the event MediaNorth has organised for this year’s Festival of Debate, entitled ‘Official Secrecy: How Government Plans Threaten Journalists and Whistleblowers’.
Official Secrets: the story of Katharine Gun
Katharine Gun successfully applied for a job at the government communication headquarters (GCHQ) in 2001 where she translated Mandarin Chinese into English. On Friday 31 January 2003, she was at the high-security compound on the outskirts of Cheltenham when an email from America came to her attention.
The email was from Frank Koza, the chief of staff in a division of the American National Security Agency. Koza’s email requested aid in a secret operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six ‘swing nations’ on the UN security council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq.
Shocked by the contents of the email she printed out a copy, put it in her bag, took it home, and spent the weekend thinking about what to do with it. On the Monday, she passed the email to a friend whom she knew was in touch with journalists.
On 2 March the email was splashed across the front page of the Observer and the following Wednesday, Gun confessed to her line manager at GCHQ that she had leaked the email, and was arrested. Gun spent a night in police custody, and eight months later was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act (OSA).
The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. The reasons for this are murky but the day before the trial, Gun’s defence team had asked the government for any records of legal advice about the lawfulness of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war.
The film Official Secrets captures these events well, with Keira Knightley playing Katharine Gun and Matt Smith the Observer journalist Martin Bright.
Proposed reform of the Official Secrets Act
In July 2021, Home Secretary Priti Patel published a consultation paper with proposals to reform the Official Secrets Act. Patel wants to update the Official Secrets Act for the digital age, but this is a spurious reason.
At the height of the pandemic, the consultation received scant attention in the media. But the proposed bill includes a major crackdown on ‘unauthorised disclosures’, or leaks of sensitive information. Much hard-hitting investigative journalism is based on such leaks. This will have a chilling effect on journalists investigating government wrongdoing and their sources.
The bill equates investigative journalism with spying, and is a direct threat to the ability of journalists and their sources to make public information about wrongdoing.
Most disturbing, the proposals want to eliminate a ‘public interest’ defence. It says this would “undermine our efforts to prevent damaging unauthorised disclosures”. In the Gun case, there is no doubt she acted in the public interest.
Attack on civil liberties
The new law should also be seen as part of a broader project on the part of Priti Patel’s Home Office to cut down civil liberties by legislative means.
If the proposed new legislation were in place at the time of Gun’s case, it is quite possible she would have been sent to prison.
Martin Bright has described the proposals as “a full-on assault on media freedom, carefully hidden behind an apparently reasonable desire for reform”. Gun faced going to prison for two years, but Patel wants to increase the maximum sentence for breach of the Official Secrets Act. If passed, journalists could face up to 14 years for this offence.
A recent case reveals just how powerful the current Official Secrets Act is when ‘a threat to national security’ is deployed to suppress reporting. The BBC was blocked from identifying an alleged MI5 informant who, according to two witness statements from ‘Beth’ and ‘Ruth’, had used his status to control and coerce them. It was in the public interest for his name to be disclosed.
The BBC doesn’t know what the reasons are for the injunction. The broadcaster said: “This is due to the highly unusual fact that a significant proportion of the evidence in this case was heard in a closed hearing, which even the BBC as a party was not permitted to attend.”
Book your place at the Festival of Debate
We need to shine a spotlight on the government’s proposed Official Secrets Act reforms and build greater public awareness of the threats they pose to investigative journalism and whistleblowers.
The Festival of Debate event has a high-profile panel of speakers: former Observer journalist Martin Bright; former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon; Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, and security and intelligence expert Stephen Dorril.
You can book your place at this free online event, which is on Thursday 28 April 6–7.30pm.
