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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

I think its increasingly true of several countries, not just the UK. Any State with strong Freedom of Information legislation not surprisingly creates incentives for certain political operatives to want to avoid exposure by use of unofficial channels further out of reach of FoI - private WhatsApp groups etc etc. I don't see this as any different than the instances of private email service mischief that has occurred in a lot of States too over the last decade (avoiding use of official email accounts for contentious discussions).

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I think that if you hold a position in the government, all of your communication (including private email, chats, etc) should be subject to public scrutiny. A government official should be defined not as someone who is holding power, but as an elected representative of the people.

Did you even think out this train of thought? Does this cover medical communications, military secrets, private chat between family members, etc?

> Did you even think out this train of thought?

Of course not, I'm just a random person on the Internet ;)

The problem here is that a basic loophole is being abused to defeat the spirit of the law, thus making the operation of the government less transparent. The consequences should ramp up in proportion with the level of the abuse. You're using private WhatsApp to conduct state business? Your WhatsApp chat logs should be subject to FoI. If you want to keep family chat private, then move it to Telegram, and DON'T use Telegram to conduct state business, because otherwise your Telegram chat logs are next up to be scrutinized. I don't think the "spirit" of this idea is going too far?

> military secrets

There already are established procedures and laws for dealing with state secrets, including strategic information such as submarine designs, locations, nuke launch codes, etc. Whatever FoI/transparency laws are in place, they need to respect the need for protecting state secrets - that should be pretty obvious.

"should" being the operative word here.

All that would happen much of the time is that people stop writing anything of consequence down, or seek secret channels like the WhatsApp example. NHS employees in the UK as another example admit privately all the time to not recording things in meetings to avoid FoI exposure.

I agree with you in principle, but you are fighting human nature in practice - generally no one wants to look bad in public. I think FoI legislation is important, but in practice the results have often been mixed, and the approach probably needs to be nuanced.

> NHS employees in the UK as another example admit privately all the time to not recording things in meetings to avoid FoI exposure.

Do you have any examples please?

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