Recent comments in /f/espionage

fortmis OP wrote

Norton-Taylor and a small band of his comrades are scarred but much decorated veterans of the ceaseless war between journalism and Whitehall secrecy – in Norton-Taylor’s case over a long career as the Guardian’s national security editor. Much of his achievement is a result of dogged, intelligent listening ‘between the lines’ to what officials are not saying. Much is his reward for persistent burrowing in the National Archives, again with a shrewd eye for which significant document is missing from a file (‘retained’). But a lifetime of experience in why, when and how officials prevaricate or lie has trained him to make proper use of an investigative journalist’s best source: the leak.

Norton-Taylor’s main objection to Whitehall secrecy is not ethical but practical. Obsessional secrecy is self-defeating. If the British media are fixated on spookery – Douglas Hurd once observed that journalists would get excited by a blank sheet of paper if it was stamped ‘Secret’ – more openness would divert their energy towards hunting out the everyday deceits of ‘normal’ politics.

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