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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
"... 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.
>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...
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.
I agree that it's a fair concern. Another recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/foreign-off...
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.
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.
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.
Another example is in healthcare: I suspect people get worse outcomes because if anyone has a different (potentially better) opinion about how a patient may be treated, they are incentivised not to voice it because any disagreement in a hospitals records will make for a much stronger case in any litigation against a hospital.
Perhaps the issue is that the media or public inquiries (or maybe courts or juries) will look at any such record as a sign of negligence rather than an ordinary thing which happens all the time in cases that go wrong and right.
But maybe signal is really being used for political scheming and some public business overflows onto signal unintentionally.