There is a well known saying attributed to Lord Acton in the late 19th century along the lines of “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I am looking for an equally pithy phrase to express the fact that secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid.

I’m not sure how many non-Australian readers will remember the Haneef case that I mentioned in 2007 in this old message. Actually that’s a collection of old bits and pieces, so if you go there you will have to search down for “Haneef” – alternatively you can just Google the name. The point is that the way the case was handled turned the Australian Federal Police into a laughing stock, and did the same for the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews. All the authorities tried to hide their puerile bad judgement behind official secrecy. It would probably be fair to say that the atrocious handling of Dr Haneef was one of many things that led the public to perceive the Howard Government as out-of-touch, and more interested in their own status and power than in doing things properly. I daresay it even contributed to Howard’s party’s trouncing at the election, so perhaps there really is a small silver lining for every cloud, eh?

Now we have a new example in the mandatory Internet filtering proposed by the government. It is acknowledged by almost everyone that the proposed scheme could cripple the Internet here (which is not the hottest service anyway), and that it would not in fact make any significant dent in the circulation of child pornography, since seriously illegal material is passed around by methods other than the web. Every right-thinking person is of course offended by child pornography, and this is the cloak being used to push the scheme. But we know governments, don’t we? After child pornography it will be ordinary pornography, then anything about euthanasia, then things that the government finds highly sensitive and embarassing… and on it goes.

The funny thing though is that the existing secret blacklist of sites that are being used for the “trials” by a small and shrinking number of ISPs (Australia’s third largest internet provider, iiNet, has just withdrawn from the trials, saying it could not “reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility”) has recently been made public, and can be obtained from well-known sites such as Wikileaks. Somebody at the paper has taken the trouble to look at the sites on this list, and it turns out to contain “a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.” In other words, if an office junior with basic internet skills had been told to go off and browse for a week to find a few sites to ban, they would not have earnt much credit for coming up with this list! Some of the porn sites may be in what many of us may find in bad taste, but isn’t it up to us to make our own minds up there?

The Communications Minister responsible for this display of childish idiocy, Stephen Conroy, is, would you believe, not just a Catholic but a member of Opus Dei! Look him up in Wikipedia.

So an honorable mention will be awarded to whoever can come up with a really pithy version of “secrecy makes stupid, top secrecy makes utterly stupid”.

Much of the information here is thanks to the SMH.

The Tibetan New year is sometimes the same as the Chinese, but sometimes a month apart. This year, the Chinese day was the 26th January, and the Tibetan will be around 25 February. Usually, of course, it’s a time of merriment, visiting, chang-drinking, fire-crackers and so on, but this year the exile community is generally not celebrating; according to the Central Administration, the official celebrations will only comprise the customary religious programmes to mark the Tibetan New Year, “taking into consideration the continuing repression in Tibet and the ruthless crackdown last year which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Tibetans and thousands imprisoned.” See, for example articles archived at the Canada Tibet Committee or at Phayul.

PS: Here’s another relevant link, at the International Campaign for Tibet.

Thanks to Lu for spotting this one!