Just hand them to the police and cut out the sententious, moralising middle man. Why so?
Over at the BBC Editors Blog, Fran Unsworth explains why the BBC did this with the ‘top secret’ documents it received.
Quite extraordinarily, the explanation doesn’t mention the 1989 Official Secrets Act at all. You might think that the legislation that governs things like missing top secret documents might enter into the BBC’s editorial calculus? Not according to Unsworth’s account.
What about the quality of the material? It’s not often we get to scrutinise intelligence assessments. Are they any good? Are the public being well served?
One of the documents was an assessment of the state of Iraqi Security forces. It didn’t seem to contain much that couldn’t already be found in published academic papers.
Best not go there.
Did the person who sent these documents on really mean for the BBC to treat them quite so…well? Unsworth has no doubts.
The member of the public who passed the documents to the BBC did us all a great favour. As a result of that action, we now know that Whitehall’s procedures on handling this material are clearly at fault. No doubt they are being tightened at this moment.
(Actually, they’d already been reported missing. And what exactly are they going to do? Ban the use of public transport?)
That member of the public presumably chose to give the material to the BBC in the knowledge that we would treat the material responsibly. I believe we did so.
They could have achieved the same result more expeditiously by simply handing the papers straight to the police. (And they wouldn’t have jeopardised national security by revealing that members of the intelligence service regularly commute between Surrey and Waterloo.)
Why did they hand them to the Beeb? They’re probably asking themselves just that.
Unsworth concludes:
Imagine the consequences if the finder had chosen to put them on the internet instead.
Imagine if someone had clicked here. It doesn’t bear thinking about…
[See also What To Do If You Find Top Secret Docs]