BIN to tighten control of state secrets

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

National Intelligence Agency (BIN) chief A.M. Hendropriyono said on Wednesday the government must tighten its control over the flow of information to prevent the leak of state secrets, pointing to the state secrecy bill as the starting point for this effort.

Asked about the government's efforts to reduce the risk of state secrets being leaked, Hendropriyono said: "That's why we are developing a system so that everyone has a standard for the things that may hurt all of us, because people sometimes place a higher priority on individual interests."

He said the government needed a common platform to allow state officials to know what information must not be revealed to the public.

"There must be secrets, for the sake of the public interest, because basically humans are wolves to one another," he said.

The government has already submitted the state secrecy bill to the House of Representatives.

The head of the National Coding Agency, Nachrowi Ramli, said state institutions must tighten security during information exchanges with one another.

He said a lack of awareness about security had led to a number of leaks of confidential information.

One example, he said, was the leaked telephone conversation between then president B.J. Habibie and then attorney general Andi Ghalib in 1999.

That conversation, which was published by Panji magazine, showed Habibie wavering on putting former president Soeharto on trial despite public pressure.

However, critics said that even without a state secrecy law access to information was already difficult to obtain, sometimes due to poor data storage but also because of official reluctance to release information.

The state secrecy bill has also been criticized for undermining another bill that seeks to increase public access to information.

This freedom of information bill also has been submitted to the House, and the question has been raised about which bill the legislators will deliberate first.

Whichever bill is endorsed first will almost certainly affect the contents of the second bill.

The freedom of information bill does stipulate which types of information are not for public consumption and can be withheld by the government.

But Hendropriyono dismissed the possibility of combining the two bills. "There would be hundreds of articles, which is too long. We have separated the bills so that they fill each other out," he said.