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> For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements.

I'm sorry, but what?! The fallout of the 737 max debacle is that the senior people didn't listen when the engineers raised concerns about safety. This is a solid example of why comms _should_ be recorded, and wholly _not_ the example of why they should not.

The guy at Boeing who couldn’t raise concerns about safety is currently under criminal investigation. The chilling effect comes from your joke about something at work becoming a punishable event. No one is blaming the single engineer for the MCAS problem but that didn’t stop him from requiring a lawyer

"Should" for us, yes. But consider the perspective of the company—and specifically its lawyers; their takeaway may be "This stuff being in writing made things worse in court, therefore we'll instruct our employees not to put this stuff in writing."

Though I would guess that having an explicit policy of "don't write down any safety concerns" would do badly in court as well. I suspect any real such policy would have to be unwritten, or a not-very-explicit side effect of something that seemed relatively benign.

That’s already known. It’s why mingling at golf clubs and galas and charity events is important and why clustering in cities is useful. Generally, you can trust conversations you have in person to not be recorded and maintain plausible deniability.

Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying.

Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence.

At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.

In my experience, unwritten policies absolutely exist in major multinational corporations.

Verba volant, scripta manent. Ancient Latins already knew the score. A lot of people initially refused to use emails in the ‘90s because they (rightly) perceived it as something written down and hence likely to be used to hold them to account - only people who grew up with IM have a more “disposable” view of electronic text.

I can assure you that any manager or owner on the planet, at some point or another, has a conversation where it is agreed that something will never be written down in any form.

Similarly, I have several friends working on wall street who flat out refuse to discuss anything related to a stock over email. Every discussion with them no matter how trivial is on the phone.

No paper trail, no investigation.

Don't phone, fax, and snail mail have more legal protections than email and other new communication methods as well?

It might be a good demonstration of that if the engineers had spotted the safety problem. As far as anyone can tell, they didn't - the press took some internal e-mails worrying about other safety problems which turned out not to actually matter, spun them as proof that their employees knew that the 737 Max was unsafe, and confused people like the commented you're replying to into thinking the problem was actually spotted internally. To give some idea about how overblown this was, the really juicy-sounding email comments were about problems with the simulator, not the actual plane. The fact that Boeing had a culture where people could speak their mind and those comments were recorded left us all less informed.

I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding on how many of these organizations work.

When I worked with the Feds (DOJ), we documented out many "what if" or contingency scenarios. They ranged from "effectively impossible" to "absolutely happening" on one axis and irrelevant to omgwtf on another. My terminology, not official ;) But we were encouraged to explore situations and scenarios and think out the likelihood, implications, relevant existing policies, potential responses under those policies, what new policies would make sense, etc. For the most part, these are creative/exploration exercises but sometimes they're deadly serious and will drive policy going forward. You don't always know at the time.

Fast forward 5, 10 or 20 years and something similar happens. Suddenly someone who happens to remember the report or get creative searching archives screams "OMG! THERE WAS A REPORT YEARS AGO AND NO ONE LISTENED!"

Correct.. but it was never a proposal/plan, just an evaluation.

Unfortunately, understanding all of that requires nuance and perspective that doesn't fit in a headline and will be buried in policy wonk discussions. I suspect if you expose all of that and give it as much attention/credibility as fully baked proposals and policies, it will chill honest, internal assessments and debate.

> But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

There's an existing mechanism in Parliamentary systems: cabinet confidentiality. All papers, records, minutes etc associated with the cabinet are held in high secrecy until a long period of time has passed. Australia holds them for 30 years unless they are otherwise active records.

It does as you say: allows ministers to talk openly amongst themselves in the highest governing body. So long as leaks are rare, it's an effective mechanism.

The issue is that UK politicians have themselves decided to evade rather than going through the legal, public process of allowing this to happen.

Even if you agree that some privacy in communications must be preserved, they didn’t do that through a process a part of which they themselves are.

Also in two minds, having worked in the civil service before. There was a slight panic when it became understood that unpaid Slack didn’t actually delete messages beyond the latest 10k; as soon as you started paying they’d all be available. Not that there was anything definitively problematic, but it just would take one newspaper to request “all Slack messages from the day before the brexit vote” and suddenly there’d be problems with the public’s perception of civil service political neutrality.

Because to be honest, everyone is political in some form or another, especially the people that effectively take a pay cut to work in the civil service because they want to help citizens, and it’s a daily challenge to keep that political nature from spilling out into your work.

Everyone needs a place to unburden, and if you’re legally forbidden from doing that with friends and family you rely on the workplace. In the end the best I could do was make a FOIA reaction emoji to remind people to tone it down if something could be perceived in the wrong way by the press.

But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

We have a media who will not give anyone the benefit of the doubt and actively seek to take sentences out of context to whip up controversy and get a few more clicks from the baying public.

I fully agree about transparency in government, but it was the public that decided that candid conversations were fair game for attacking not just politicians and officials, but anyone.

There are at least partial solutions such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule but they rely on the good faith of the attendees, that's not something you can take for granted when tabloid journalists are present.

The real solution is to dilute political power further not by eliminating it but expanding it.

There’s game theory to back up the idea of a balancing act by making everyone police.

Personally I’d prefer expansion of representatives (in the US, but it’s not too hard to translate to UK) and/or judiciary.

In the case of the judiciary, technology could be applied transparently via open source models of building case management, looking for patterns, weighting their correctness by social means....

But of course we’ll keep wanking memes from ancient history

British government has transparency problem at much higher level. There is official report from investigation of rape gangs. It includes almost 100k child rape victims in many cities over 3 decades. Government refuses to release it, and pretends this abuse does not exists.

Do you have a source on the 100k figure?

No, that is an estimate from forum thread compiled from many articles. Wikipedia claims 1400 victims just in Rotherham.

For anyone wondering what this is about, see Rotherham investigation[0]. It’s a fairly damning read.

I can’t remember the figures as far victim counts (read this a long time ago and am not eager for a refresher), any number would be too big frankly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

It is a very damning read. Quoting just one part

"... had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men. ... The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class and gender—contemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism and damage community relations; the Labour council's reluctance to challenge a Labour-voting ethnic minority; lack of a child-centred focus;"

So the council didn't take any action to avoid "allegations of racism and damage community relations". This makes no sense. What did the council think will happen when the news breaks out. Won't it increase racial bias by leaps and bounds. And to just avoid the allegations of racism, the council was willing to let this continue? How do such people sleep at night.

It's a very sad and horribly managed situation in the name of supposedly good intentions. However, the facts and details have been drummed up over the years by Murdoch-owned media, and the statistics used to "prove" the extent of the abuse, and its attribution to "Asian men" has been criticized as not only unscientific but pseudoscientific. There's a good overview of the history of the case, its media attention, and journalistic standards, by Cockbain and Tufail, two academic criminologists, here[0]. Not only that, but some of the victims themselves have spoken out about being used as playing chips for right-wing rhetoric in Rotherham (as noted in the paper).

>Javid’s response to Champion was scooped by The Times’ aforementioned Andrew Norfolk and reported as the home secretary having ‘ordered research into why men convicted of grooming-gang sex crimes are disproportionately of Pakistani origin’.44 Although this angle misrepresented Javid’s actual letter, it was repeated across numerous news outlets – and neither Javid nor Champion apparently cared to correct it.45 Consequently, the impression stood that ethnic disproportionality in ‘grooming gangs’ was an accepted fact and legitimate focus for government-commissioned research.

And rather importantly:

>Although criminal justice data on ethnicity should always be treated cautiously (and data on religion are simply not collected as standard), Asians were notably not overrepresented among the approximately 172,000 men and 27,000 women convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales in 2016.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968198957...

The source of the leaked communications would be another MP, as presumably no one else would have access. That means enforcing such a rule would create a parliamentary privilege debacle.

And since this is a non-recorded communication, about non-secret matters, how do determine if anyone actually broke the rule or not? There will never be evidence to back up an accusation, unless someone admits to it for some reason.

More generally: anything that is made public, will be politicised.

I agree that it's a fair concern. Another recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/foreign-off...

The logical conclusion of that is secret government - perfectly "apolitical", but impossible to question or participate in.

No, that is not the logical conclusion. There are still great advantages to open government, but what I said remains true.

Consider the incident with the British ambassador to the US, that I linked above. The ambassador's job was to evaluate the Trump presidency. His conclusions were damning, and when the document leaked, there were predictable political consequences. If such reports are made open as a matter of policy, they become worthless, as they can no longer be plainly honest.

Everything is politicized at the moment. It reminds me of the scene in VEEP where the politicians have to eat with their hands because “utensils are too political.” It’s absurd but I think it’s a symptom of larger issues and avoiding transparency won’t stop the divisive politics.