It's a great pleasure to address this very important conference. I speak to you today as the Secretary of the United Kingdom's Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, an independent body which provides guidelines to the UK media on the disclosure of national security information.

I've been asked to speak to you on the subject of ‘Secrecy vs Security', an intriguing title. The use of the term ‘versus' - suggesting that ‘secrecy' and ‘security' are somehow inevitably in opposition - reminded me of a famous book called ‘Animal Farm'. Written in the mid-1940s by George Orwell, perhaps the greatest British political literary satirist of the 20 th Century, ‘Animal Farm' is a biting parody of state over-control, using Stalinist Russia as its implicit model. As those of you who have read it will recall, the book begins with a rebellion by the animals of Manor Farm who feel they are being oppressed by the owner – Mr Jones. The rebellion against Jones is led by the pigs, the cleverest of the Farm's animals, who rename their community ‘Animal Farm'. They announce that ‘all animals are equal' and coin the slogan ‘four legs good, two legs bad'. But after its high-minded beginning, Animal Farm follows a seemingly inevitable course towards inversion and reversion, with the pigs progressively controlling the other animals in the same way as Farmer Jones. In the end, the pigs move into Jones' farmhouse, learn to walk on two legs, alter the Animal Farm doctrine to ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others' and change the Farm's slogan from ‘four legs good, two legs bad' to ‘four legs good, two legs better'.

I'm won't test your patience today by trying to argue ‘security good, secrecy bad', and certainly not ‘security good; secrecy better'. The world is far too complex for such simplistic, black/white, right/wrong judgements, even if I did believe that security and secrecy were necessarily alternatives: which I do not. But what I would like to offer you today is why I believe that security and secrecy can be both complementary and opposing concepts, depending on how they are implemented. The message I offer is ‘security good; secrecy also good' at least at certain very specific times, in certain clearly defined circumstances, and provided that how and when secrecy is imposed, it is done so with common sense and moderation and tempered with proper instruments of oversight and public accountability.

Contemporary British society has a dialectic view of secrecy. The British people see personal secrecy – privacy it is generally called - as an inalienable right, part of the nation's birthright a fundamental component of their freedom. The introduction of measures seen to erode it are attacked widely and with full force as a matter of the highest principle, with the default setting always protecting personal privacy – except in cases of the most dire and immediate national emergencies. Pressure groups - such as Liberty - exist specifically to champion that cause and do so with great energy and determination and much popular support. ‘Privacy' is indeed the word in general use here rather than secrecy, but the two in this context mean the same: the right to hold back from the public domain information about an individual that he or she wishes to remain a personal secret. In Britain, the right to personal secrecy is safeguarded in law - inter alia - by the Data Protection Act of 1998 and Article 8 of the Human Rights Act also of 1998. Journalistic secrecy is similarly seen as being critical to personal freedom through its role in ensuring that government is accountable. Journalists, and on occasion editors, or even (on at least one famous occasion) a CEO, are willing to risk public censure, even prison, to preserve their secrets, and most notably the identity of their sources.

But in the context of public governance, secrecy has an almost entirely negative popular resonance within Britain. Indeed, it is often presented as posing threats that extend well beyond the obvious areas of personal or collective freedoms, to prosperity, continued employment and individual ways of life. One could sum up the British view of secrecy as ‘Private secrecy good, but public secrecy bad'.

Part of this comes from our cultural legacy: the apparently innate British preference for individual freedom and our historic suspicion of centralised government, wherever it might be based. But this preference has been mightily strengthened by the knowledge-centric society in which we now live. Information management techniques play an already dominant and still swiftly growing part in all our lives. While privacy is carefully safeguarded, official secrecy can often seem incompatible with this. For example, one of the key enabling policies of any system which seeks to impose secrecy – be it personal, commercial, military or governmental - is that of ‘need to know': this aims to restrict the type and quantity of information released to individuals to that which they really need. The theory behind ‘need to know' is that it reduces the danger of, and limits the damage sustained through, security breaches, compromise or betrayal. But there are growing problems with ‘need to know'. Even if one agrees with the principle, which many do not (at least when it is applied at the collective level), ‘need to know' involves making highly subjective judgements. No one really knows what they (or anyone else) really need to know, until – that is - they need to know it. Indeed, deciding what people need to know is one of the most fundamental challenges facing knowledge management development. It is also a very convincing reason why people should be at liberty to search the full extent of the knowledge spectrum, as and when the need arises, to find out the particular information they need. And secrecy can only hinder that search.

But of even greater concern to the majority is the potential to exploit secrecy to abuse power. There is no question that a general culture of excessive secrecy holds serious threats to us all. Knowledge is power – today far more than ever before. And the denial of information, however obscure, is seen by some as reducing their power, while the hording of it by others is seen as increasing theirs. Secrecy in whatever form denies access to information which some believe to be public property by right. Secrecy applied selectively can lead people into making flawed judgements because they do not have all the pertinent facts. Applied in blanket form, it raises concerns that whole areas of government activity are being shielded from proper public scrutiny and accountability. In both forms, secrecy can erode trust in authority, appear to set one group in society above and beyond the others and raise concerns that individuals in Government, or even whole Government departments, may be out of proper control and unaccountable.

Setting aside these objections of principle, there are also some very practical difficulties in keeping secrets secret. Firstly, there is cost. Secrecy is a very expensive business, and the wider the range of secrets that have to be kept, the more difficult they become to manage, administer and police. Secrecy imposes widespread and diverse burdens on the administrative machinery which add time and cost to government processes without adding any apparent value to the products. So much so in fact that whichever preferences a government may have, its ability to impose secrecy will be limited by the capacity of its administrative machine to manage the associated procedures, absorb the constraints and still work at an acceptable level of efficiency.

Allied to that, and of rapidly increasing importance, there is the World Wide Web. The internet has become an information gathering and dissemination tool of unprecedented capacity and - outside of China at least - available to all in a pretty well unfettered form. The already awesome power of the internet is fed only in part by the already colossal and still rapidly growing capacity and power of the international media, now more closely integrated (at least at the technical level) than ever before. A story reported in an obscure journal in a remote region can be picked up and within hours be repeated all over the World. It then remains on the Google and Yahoo data bases where it can be accessed for evermore. Once there, the use to which it can be put cannot be restricted. The terrorists who carried out the London bombings of 7 July last year – for example - appear to have gathered the information they needed to make their bombs from the World Wide Web without external assistance.

The challenges posed by the World Wide Web to those who seek to keep information secret apply not only to individual pieces of information (which can now be posted by anyone for example on web-logs or ‘blogs'), but also to what can be learned through a process of aggregation. The traditional modus operandi of intelligence officers is to gather seemingly innocuous information, assemble it into a coherent mosaic and then make sensible judgements from the picture that emerges. This can now be performed to a surprisingly high level of competence by anyone with the time, wit and inclination who has access to an internet computer. Sometimes called ‘the jigsaw effect', this phenomenon can lead civil or military bureaucrats down the path of even greater and more unproductive secrecy in an attempt to spot information which could form some part of a future sensitive jigsaw.

Of course, like a real jigsaw, one assembled with pieces from the internet does not always produce a true picture. Sometimes, the person assembling the jigsaw forces the individual pieces together to make the picture he believes to be the right one, whether or not it truly matches that on the outside of the box. Sometimes he feels that pieces are missing, when instead they are all there but have been wrongly assembled. Nevertheless, critics of official secrecy do have a point when they argue that the ‘Web' now ensures that no secret is inviolable and thus efforts made by Governments to preserve official secrecy are ultimately likely to prove futile. But equally, governments can point out that there is no obligation on them to assemble - or even make a gift of key pieces - of jigsaw puzzles which might then be used to inflict death and injury on the people they are charged to protect. Whatever one's views are on this, I don't think that anyone doubts that the ‘jigsaw effect' is a powerful factor; the dispute is centred on whether its effects are more ‘good' than ‘bad'.

Another practical constraint on official secrecy is the public's willingness to accept it. This is not so much ‘whether or not?', but ‘how much the market will bear?' In Britain, the answer to that question is ‘not very much'. Moreover, attempts to extend official secrecy tend to strengthen the determination of those who claim to champion liberty and who seek to expose ‘the truth' as they see it, regardless of the consequences. Little or no general opprobrium now seems to be attached in Britain to the selective leaking of secret government papers; not a Sunday goes by without the publication of extracts from some leaked official document or other. Even when the ‘leaker' is found (which is not often, given the nature of information distribution systems and the ability to take copies even with a mobile phone) he or she is often portrayed as a hero: someone who has taken a stand on principle against those who are seeking to deny to the public information which is rightly theirs. It is somewhat paradoxical that as freedom of information has expanded, conspiracy theorists have become ever more prominent. Perhaps we should not be surprised by this for secrecy arouses people's fascination, and attempts to shape the news – ‘spin' – are widely resented. Official denials are now taken almost automatically by those who love ‘cloak and dagger' stories as confirmation that what is being denied is in fact true; one often hears the slogan ‘never believe anything until it is officially denied!'

The ‘whistleblower' mentality holds that it is morally indefensible to keep information from the general public which in any way concerns them. Such a view fails on two counts. Firstly, it ignores the misuse to which certain types of information can be put by individuals or groups willing to use violence to achieve their aims. And secondly, the leaker rarely - if ever - has all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle and, thus, lacks the ‘full picture'; he/she cannot judge the range of the consequences which might flow from the information released. For example, publishing details of the timing, scope and location of imminent military or intelligence operations can warn the enemy, allow them to prepare and lead directly to loss of friendly lives, not only for those actually involved in the operation, but also – as a direct consequence - the lives of those who the operation was designed to protect. Another example is the measures put in place to protect people (both military and civilian) against – say - terrorist bomb attacks. If the terrorist knows exactly how an installation is protected, he can invariably find a way around the defences.

But perhaps I can best illustrate the need for a measure of secrecy by examining the Secret Services – arguably the most sensitive institutions of any nation. In Britain there are three Secret Services: the Security Service (more often called MI5 - which deals with domestic security), the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS (of James Bond fame and more often called MI6 - which deals with overseas human intelligence gathering) and the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, which intercepts communications. All three of these Services are established by the law of the land, are publicly accountable (if not directly then certainly to the public's representatives) and are subject to careful parliamentary and judicial oversight.

These Services operate in a world of enduring fascination to the public, but they depend on secrecy to do their job of protecting the British people and the people of allied and friendly nations against a wide range of current threats. These threats include – inter alia – terrorism in all its many forms, illegal narcotics, mass people trafficking, organised crime and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in addition to the more traditional counter-espionage role. The details and even the very existence of their operations - future, present and even past - and the identities of those who work for them, have to be protected by very high secrecy levels.

The possible consequences of such secrets being compromised were shown around the turn of the year when a Greek newspaper published what it claimed to be the name and photograph of the British SIS Head of Station in Athens. This was followed two weeks later by the Russian state broadcasting service showing footage of what it claimed to be four British SIS officers in Moscow accessing supposedly secret information from a transmitter receiver device disguised as a rock. These were not isolated incidents. Indeed, a cottage industry has developed in recent years – no doubt partly at least as a reaction to Secret Service secrecy - to publish the identities of Secret Service agents for the whole world to see. Such ‘secret agent spotting' is generally looked on as some form of harmless game that embarrasses the bureaucrats and shows how clever the agent spotters are.

But it is not a harmless game. The Secret Services have to maintain a strict ‘neither confirm nor deny' policy whether or not the person so named is one of their people. Even if that were not so the ‘never believe anything until it's officially denied' philosophy means that an official denial would probably be pointless. Persons named as Secret Service officers or agents are often totally separate from the Secret Services, but they and their families suffer just as badly. Whether true or false, public naming damages a Secret Services' reputation for being able to keep its own secrets; it undermines the Services' confidence, weakens its morale, and through that erodes personnel retention and recruitment. The collection of secret intelligence from sensitively placed human sources depends crucially on maintaining their confidence. This relationship is always very delicate and can be damaged when identities are disclosed. Naming – whether true or false - deters potential informants from contact with officers for fear of exposure. Officers whose names have been widely reported cannot subsequently be deployed across the full range of the services' work, and thus years of training and experience needed to reach the required level of competency can quickly be ruined. And the more a name is repeated across the media, the greater the damage. The net result of such disclosures is to deny Britain valuable intelligence about hostile intent or capabilities. It is an undeniable fact that attempts to breach Secret Service secrecy harm the people directly involved (whether or not they are Secret Service members) and ultimately they can - and often do - harm us all: that includes you and me. They ruin lives and for some lead to injury or death. For the Secret Services, secrecy is not some outdated fetish; it is the key enabler in the job they do; quite simply they cannot protect us without it.

We can draw three important deductions from all these points. Firstly, that a degree of secrecy – qualified certainly by time, subject matter, detail and oversight - is indispensable in preserving security. Secondly, that there are practical limits to how much information, and for how long, any government can keep secret. And thirdly, keeping secrets in the modern World depends on consensus and shared responsibility. The release of a highly classified secret may not damage security if it can be found only on an obscure website or journal which few if any read; de facto it remains buried. The problem for security begins when it becomes widely available in the public domain and difficult to ignore even for the most casual browser. When that happens there is no telling who might find it or to what use it might be put. And in deciding whether a piece of information is or is not widely available in the public domain, it is the media that plays the decisive role. It is ultimately they who will judge whether or not, and how widely, information is published or broadcast, and in reaching that decision they face balancing their own rights and interests against their wider societal duties and obligations.

This is the key premise that underpins the UK's Defence Advisory (DA) Notice system. Unique to Great Britain, this system emerged at the end of the Cold War from the long established ‘D Notice' system, which was widely seen as a form of government censorship. The present DA Notice system was shaped to meet the very different conditions already emerging in the early 1990s, and was from the outset based on consensus and shared responsibility between government and the national media for the disclosure of national security information. The system is overseen by the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee or DPBAC – an independent body with a joint membership of 5 very senior civil servants and 13 leading members of the UK media. All government departments concerned with national security are represented, and the DPBAC media members represent virtually all areas of the UK media. These include the BBC, ITV, ITN, Sky TV, the Periodical Publishers Association, the Newspaper Publishers Association, the Newspaper Society, the Press Association and the Scottish Daily Newspaper Society. The (book) Publishers Association have so far chosen not to be represented on the Committee, but their members nevertheless use the DA-Notice system. Links have also been established with the UK Internet Service Providers Association.

The code endorsed by the DPBAC is set down in five standing DA Notices which define the areas that the Committee considers to be at the core of national security. And that is their limit; they do not extend to any other sensitive areas which a government might wish to keep secret, such as internal policy disputes, waste, vice, scandal, corruption, failures in military discipline and the like. They are not orders, but purely requests, ones which are framed broadly to allow scope for sensible interpretation.

I will not describe them in depth, but to give you an idea of their scope I would like to show you the various areas covered by each DA Notice. As you will appreciate, the release of details in any of these areas could allow an enemy to devise effective counters that would lead directly and quickly to the death and injury of British troops and perhaps to operational failure.

DA Notice No 2 deals with certain types of nuclear and non-nuclear defence equipment, whereas DA Notice No 3 covers highly classified codes and ciphers, related data protection measures and communication facilities, or those of NATO or other allies. Clearly, compromised codes and ciphers put at risk the classified information which they are created to protect, threatening security and indirectly lives. DA Notice No 4 deals with sensitive installations and the home details of individuals likely to be targeted by terrorists. The final DA Notice, No 5, covers the intelligence and security services, the Special Forces, and those who are likely targets for attack by terrorists.

Please note that these DA Notices have been agreed by representatives of the UK government and UK media, are published in full and can be accessed by the public on the DPBAC's website: www.dnotice.org.uk. They are framed to permit sensible interpretation and negotiation between journalists, authors and editors on the one hand, and the DPBAC Secretary on the other. They act as a societal agreement between the UK government and media to share responsibility for the disclosure of national security information, one which upholds the media's right to report in the public interest but recognises it has an obligation to ensure that the public is not damaged as a result.

The two key supporting pillars of this very British arrangement are confidentiality and consent. Journalist and editors must have confidence that when they seek DA Notice advice it will not be used against them or their story passed to competitors. Without that assurance they would cease to seek advice and the system would collapse. It was this reality, and the feeling that the Committee must retain its independent status, that led the DPBAC to conclude (apparently paradoxically) that they should not seek to become subject to the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Freedom of Information Act Scotland (2002). The Committee ensures full transparency about its policy and the debates that lead to its formulation – inter alia - by the publication in full of the minutes of its meetings on its website. But the continuing effectiveness of the system relies on individual casework, and the advice offered by the Committee's Secretariat to government officials and to members of the media and public remaining strictly private.

The second of the system's supporting pillars is that advice offered under the system does not have to be accepted. It is a purely voluntary code, unsupported by any form of legal sanction. A journalist who seeks DA Notice advice on his/her story, is perfectly at liberty not to accept that advice, either in whole or in part. Even if advised against it, he or she is fully entitled to publish or broadcast the information concerned if, for example, he/she believes that the case made for not publishing is weak, or if a very important principle is at stake. In effect the system is meant to act as a safety net for journalists and editors; something which does not gag them but helps to ensure that they do not inadvertently damage national security.

As you will already have guessed there are many problems with this system. The voluntary nature of the DA Notice system exposes it as much to criticism from hard-liners who would prefer more draconian sanctions for perceived security breaches, as to civil libertarians who see in it a disguised form of censorship and a way of seducing the free press. It is also a very tricky system to manage. The issues involved are rarely clear cut, and usually highly subjective. They include many things about which reasonable people could disagree. Also, the media agencies who take a responsible position and seek DA Notice advice often feel disadvantaged in comparison with those who don't and who publish or broadcast damaging information regardless of the consequences. In perhaps the World's most fiercely competitive business, one in which the British media see themselves as leading players, this is very important. Associated with this, the DA Notice system is British-only, whereas news and information services and threats to security are already overwhelmingly international in their character. It also relies on consultation in an era of real-time and world-wide TV news broadcasts that can instantly put information widely into the public domain that cuts right across the code.

All of these areas of challenge can only increase in the future. As the electronic media becomes ever more technically integrated, as search engines become ever faster, more discriminating and more powerful, as people are able to access World-wide news through a growing number of gadgets and as media competition becomes ever more fierce, it will become increasingly difficult to argue that after its release that a piece of information is not automatically widely available in the public domain and easily accessed.

Does all of this suggest that the British DA Notice system, already imperfect, is likely to decline in effectiveness in the future? Perhaps so; we shall have to wait and see. But even if it does decline, would that be a good enough reason for abandoning a system which continues to contribute to our security? What are the alternatives to it? Seeking greater secrecy through more stringent and intrusive legislation? I know of no one who wants that; and anyway, for all the reasons mentioned earlier, Britain already has what most people see as the maximum practical level of secrecy in the existing conditions. The only other alternative to that would be a free-for-all in which British journalists, denied the benefits of authoritative advice, would run the risk of inadvertently publishing or broadcasting information that would cause the death or injury of British troops or civilians. I know of no British journalist who wishes to be responsible for that either.

Someone once said that democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others. It might also be said that the DA Notice system is the worst way of providing national security media support, except for the alternatives. Secrecy like security is never absolute; it is always limited and relative. The DA system accepts that reality and works within it. In any case, Secrecy is just one of many elements in any security structure, and it has to be kept in balance with the others; in terms of national security this includes most notably public and media consent. Despite its limitations, the DA Notice system continues to be relevant and make an important contribution. It has delivered a great deal in the protection of our national security simply because it accepts that media-government relations in this area at least must be based on a partnership rather being automatically adversarial.

At a time when a depressingly wide spectrum of groups regard the serialised mass slaughter of innocent individuals as a perfectly acceptable policy instrument, difficult balances have to be struck. One of those balances is that between security (in its widest interpretation) and secrecy. The most precious of all human rights is the right to life, and to preserve that today some information has to be kept secret. To ensure that that secrecy is not exploited for purposes other than preserving national security, it is far better that sensible people enter into a dialogue within defined boundaries as to what should or should not be placed, or at least widely repeated, in the public domain. This avoids wholesale recourse to the law courts, or – even worse - more restrictive laws formally extending the bounds of official secrecy. Such a dialogue fosters collective responsibility for something of key importance to us all, and it upholds the absolute right of the media to breach the established guidelines without the threat of legal sanction if they judge at any time that the arrangement is being exploited or that a crucial principle is being risked.

I would like to finish with two true stories about the Duke of Wellington – the man who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. The first was in Wellington's early days as a British commander in India. He was asked by a local ruler to disclose a particular piece of intelligence in exchange for a large bribe, a common enough transaction in those imperfect times. The Duke looked furtively over his shoulder and, coming closer, asked if the ruler could keep a secret. The ruler's eyes lit up as he answered ‘Yes, of course I can'. The Duke, with that cold aloofness for which he was to become so famous, replied in turn: ‘Well, so can I!' Wellington could indeed keep secrets and did so throughout his life. When asked by Lord Uxbridge (his second-in-command and the commander of his cavalry) immediately before the battle of Waterloo what his plans were, Wellington simply replied ‘To beat the French'. He followed this with an aside that ‘If I thought my hair knew what my brain was thinking I would shave it off immediately'. In today's World we don't need to go to those lengths, but we should surely recognise that a degree of secrecy is indispensable for security. In trying to strike the right balance between ‘secrecy and security' we can safely set aside George Orwell's Animal Farm slogan of ‘4 legs good, 2 legs bad', as we can also its successor ‘4 legs good, 2 legs better'. Instead we should recognise that - as in nature - ‘4 legs good, 2 legs also good' does apply here, at least at certain times, in certain carefully defined and broadly endorsed areas and provided it is applied with common sense and moderation and tempered with proper instruments of oversight and public accountability.

My job covers what should be just one small part of our subject this evening, namely National Security. But of course, National Security is a loosely used term that covers a multitude of circumstances, and sometimes a multitude of sins. But before I talk about National Security, and about the impact of 9/11 on my area, and about official secrecy generally, I will just remind you, very briefly, what the D-Notice system is and is not.

The purpose of the D-Notice Committee is simply to give advice on the publication of National Security matters. It has no statutory basis, and no powers whatsoever. The Committee consists of 13 media representatives, mostly editor or managing editor level, and four very senior civil servants. They are all responsible individually to their nominating organisation, but collectively the D-Notice Committee is responsible to nobody – not to any government department, and certainly not to any politicians.

About three years ago the Committee hammered out and eventually agreed 5 standing generic D-Notices, which are much shorter and more liberal than in the Cold War days. And week on week, as the only full time member of the system, I then apply the advice in these Notices, with those who consult me, in as independent, liberal and open a way as I can.

In practice, I am as likely to advise officials that something really is not that secret, as I am to advise a journalist that some detail really would endanger a life or an ongoing operation. But nobody on either side has to ask my advice, and, even if they do, they don’t have to follow it.

Now, National Security. It is mentioned, as either a justification or as an exemption, in many Acts – the Official Secrets Act, Terrorism Act, Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, to name several, and note how many of those are relatively new. But nowhere is National Security actually defined. It is what lawyers call ‘an ambulatory concept’, a phrase I love, to be interpreted on each occasion in the light of the allegedly unforeseeable circumstances. It is in fact quite hard to define National Security in a couple of lines – it is rather like the concept of consent in sex - we all know roughly what it means, but when it comes to precise definition and to real cases, people have strongly varying views.

In practice in Britain, the only agreed concept of National Security currently on the streets is, de facto, that enshrined in the 5 standing D-Notices. And the point I want to make about this concept is that it is a much more narrowly constrained and specific concept than that implied in all the Acts of Parliament that I have mentioned. The D-Notices do not, for example, consider even the most violent of the current Animal Liberation Front activists to be terrorists. Nor do we advise against publication of any detail unless it really does involve serious damage, that is grave danger to the country and/or to its people, and certainly not matters just politically or bureaucratically embarrassing. In these respects, our criteria are obviously very different to the loose catch-all nature of the Acts of Parliament that I have referred to.How has September 11 last year changed the D-Notice system? The answer may be the only relatively good news you hear tonight. It is that September 11 has changed nothing – the standing D-Notices remain as before, and I have very consciously ensured that the way I interpret them has also remained unchanged. In my perception, although we live in an unstable and sometimes dangerous world, we also did so before 9/11. We are certainly now more aware of the threat from one particular direction, and that threat is possibly more directly focussed on us now because of our role since 9/11, but on the other hand the intelligence and security services are also now better organised to counter it, even if no measures against terrorists can ever be 100%, and an element of good luck is needed. So the situation is not so significantly more dangerous now that we need to go overboard on new security measures, especially any that greatly erode civil liberties.

So where does that leave official secrecy? Even before September 11 last year, we all saw how the Freedom of Information Act had been watered down behind the scenes, and implementation postponed. You may not have seen, but I can assure you it is so, that the way in which Ministries now treat Data Protection Act requests is also not as open-handed as when it first came into force. And to end with the oldest Act in question, the current version of Official Secrets Act is now effectively 14 years old.

It was written in a vastly different world, still in the Cold War era, and for a public who then had rather different attitudes to many aspects of what can loosely be described as human rights. Many other aspects of British and international life have also changed in the intervening years, including the style of our government, the international legal framework, and the role of the media, and of course there is the impact of the internet on matters of secrecy. It seems logical therefore to me that, sooner rather than later, the Official Secrets Act will need to be looked at again.

However, this, and other aspects of greater openness, have no high political or bureaucratic priority, nor are the media themselves, individually or collectively, very consistent in pressing for greater openness. Nor, in the view of many in Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street, does anyone in the British public beyond the M25 have much interest in any of this. Personally I disagree strongly with such a cynical view. But I am not sure what it will be that will light the blue touch-paper of the rocket of reform.

There are very few people who can claim to have a job that is unique in the world, but I do, since no other country has anything like our Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee. In October 2002, this peculiar and peculiarly British institution celebrates its 90th anniversary. It started as an ad hoc meeting of senior newspapermen and civil servants who shared then a mutual concern about giving away secrets useful to the German Naval build-up. It has continued ever since, through war and peace, independent of any government department, an informal and voluntary system, albeit one which has gathered a certain mythological status along the way.

The Committee’s role is to provide advice on the publication of National Security matters, and it currently has 13 media members (mostly managing editor level, nominated by their professional associations) and four ex-officio very senior civil servants from MoD, FCO and Home Office. In 2000, the Committee agreed the current Defence Advisory Notices, of which there are now just five, and they are standing Notices giving generic advice, and so, contrary to the popular misconception, a specific Notice is not ‘slapped on’ a particular story. The Committee meets twice a year to discuss any current matters of concern, and to listen to me, as the only permanent representative of the system, account to them for the advice I have given to media and officials in the previous six months, based on the standing Notices.

As simple as that. Well, not quite. The job has its interesting side, and I have the necessary high security clearances to poke around and find out what is really going on in the secret world before I give advice. The advice to the media is sometimes that some details really would endanger life and/or operations if published, and the advice to officials is, alternatively, occasionally that the story really does not contain anything very secret, because it is already in the public domain, or because it would not seriously endanger anything, or because it is merely just embarrassing to some department. And as I spend so much time talking to journalists, I am also of course the recipient of plenty of unpublished media intelligence and scuttlebutt. What I hear from either side is not passed on, unless the originator wishes it to be.

Because I am a one-man-band, the job also has its tedious side, for example being available to officials and journalists 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (and much of what is left of British investigative journalism seems to come to a head at weekends!). It is also a time-consuming chore to have to skim most newspapers and magazines daily, and to keep in touch as best I can with broadcast and internet happenings, and to read through some occasionally awful manuscripts of books.

But, although there are very serious and even dangerous matters at stake, even the more tedious duties can have their amusing side. The first time I was called away from a long Sunday lunch to give some fairly mundane telephone advice to a journalist, I omitted to keep a note of what I had said, so was relieved when I rang him later and found that he had obviously also been at a long Sunday lunch, and so we started again from scratch! Similarly, early in my tour, when first skimming the half-yearly ‘Bookseller’ tome for advance notice of books by or about spies, etc, I thought I could at least skip the culinary section, only to discover that the former Head of the East German Secret Service had once written a cookery book – but I have yet to discover whether his recipes were indeed life-endangering.

Being necessarily so accessible, and having also set up a much-visited website in the interests of openness (http://www.dnotice.org.uk/), I also receive a number of requests for information and advice from the public, some of them eccentric. In this regard, let me state categorically that there is no DA-Notice on stories about UFOs! Nor is there anything in the DA-Notices that prevents any accused person, whether he or she has ever genuinely worked for the Secret or Security Services or MoD, from appearing in court! More sinister, however, during the foot and mouth crisis, were queries from people involved who were allegedly told (by nameless officials) that they should not talk about their experiences because ‘it was all covered by a D-Notice for reasons of National Security’ – which of course it was not.

National Security is a phrase often used, including in various Acts (eg those concerning Official Secrets, Data Protection, Freedom of Information, Regulation of Investigatory Powers, Terrorism, etc), but it is nowhere defined. It is what lawyers call ‘an ambulatory concept’, which to some is like Humpty Dumpty’s ‘It means just what I choose it to mean’, but in practice it is indeed quite hard to define concisely. For that reason, the concept of National Security contained in the five DA-Notices and their Introduction is the only agreed concept on the streets. It has no statutory status, but it is where officials administering the various Acts are encouraged at least to start. And it is what the media understand as where the line is drawn.

How do I get involved in cases? Usually when a journalist rings me with the germ of a sensitive National Security story, to seek advice about certain details. Or when someone from the Secret Intelligence or Security Services, or GCHQ, or MoD, rings me with a concern about some detected media interest. Or occasionally when I know of something sensitive going on which is likely to become public, and I pre-emptively advise editors why it would be dangerous to publish the story for the time being, for example when Special Forces operations were under way to rescue hostages in Sierra Leone.

In many of these cases I need to shuttle to and fro, informing, persuading and advising, until a solution acceptable to both sides is found. It is very rare, once my rationale has been explained, for an official or journalist totally to ignore my advice, and it has certainly never happened where a serious danger has been involved. This is not because I have any powers, or any special skill, but because the criteria in the Notices have been very carefully worked out to be acceptable to both sides in today’s security environment.

Being in the no-man’s land between two powerful armies, that of officialdom and that of the media, I try to see each through the eyes of the other. The media perceive officialdom generally (including, but to a lesser extent, the military) as being unjustifiably secretive about almost everything they do, even when National Security is not seriously at risk, and even when there is a clear Public Interest reason for publication. And officials (including most of the military) perceive the media generally as being interested only in bad news, careless about factuality and the security of others, and given to door-stepping people at a time of misfortune.

There are elements of truth in both perceptions, but the major reason for sometimes counter-productively poor relations is mutual ignorance. Serious financial pressures and fierce competition, within and between the different parts of the media, mean that there are fewer journalists these days who are National Security specialists, fewer layers of experienced editorial staff, and almost nobody there with personal military experience. So the implications for security of publication are not always understood. Similarly, there are very few officials or military who understand the organisation and pressures of modern journalism, and how to present a developing story, or who feel comfortable talking to the media. So there is unnecessary apprehension and secrecy. Part of my job involves bridging this gap of suspicion and poor communication about National Security matters, trying to persuade officials that one can trust most journalists if one treats them intelligently, and has an intelligent case, and trying to persuade journalists that officials and military sometimes have justifiable reasons of operational and personal security for being reticent.

That said, I am lucky in the calibre of those with whom I work on both sides, who are in many and amusing ways very similar to each other – intelligent, energetic, resourceful, witty, fiercely robust, gossipy, and full of testosterone (they are also mainly white, male and middle-class). Both sides have a top league reputation with their peers worldwide. There are things about both sides which have been surprises to me too, including: the absolute power of hire-and-fire which editors have over their staff, and proprietors have over editors, as ruthless as in any professional football club; ‘C’s’ dining room, which must have one of the best corporate views in Britain; the youth of most editors; the number of fingers in the MOD media handling pie.

Finally, what are the questions I am most often asked, apart from ‘what on earth do you do?’? The first is, ‘Why does UK have a D-Notice system if no other country does?’. The answer lies partly in history, but mainly it is because the system still serves a useful purpose to both media and officialdom, in being a quick, cheap and flexible bridge between the two, and an effective way of avoiding constant, costly and unpredictable litigation, which rarely reflects well on either side with the public. And the other common question is ‘Why is the D-Notice Secretary always an admiral?’. The truth is that that is a complete mystery. But some people do still prefer to believe that it is a secret on which a D-Notice has been slapped.

ick Wilkinson
Rear Admiral
Secretary,
Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee

Since the 11 September terrorist attacks, quite properly many articles have been published and broadcasts been made which have speculated about potential and imminent action against the terrorists, in particular by Special Forces. There has also been speculation about intelligence and security activities and intentions. What has gone out so far has included comparatively little not already in the public domain, and the spirit of the advice in the DA-Notices has largely been observed.

However, as the next phase of military and intelligence planning and action now gets under way, here and in other countries co-operating against this particular terrorism, informed speculation may become very close to the truth. It would be operationally very helpful therefore, and a reassurance to those who may be going into action in the coming days or months, if editors could now minimise such speculation, whether by their own journalists or by retired military people. And if even greater care could be exercised in considering information which could be of use to the terrorists and their supporters. There will of course continue to be some military matters, and even very occasionally some security matters, which should be reported as events unfold. I am constantly available to advise whenever you or your staff feel that you may be getting into the sensitive areas outlined in the DA-Notices.

Nick Wilkinson
Rear Admiral
Secretary,
Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee

I start with a principle, one which I am quite strongly attached to. That is that each of us as an individual is entitled not only to privacy, but to some secrets obviously as long as these secrets do no serious harm to any other being.

By extension, I believe that that principle applies to groups of individuals too – families, societies, associations, unions, etc, etc.

Ultimately this principle applies to the state too. But – there is of course a qualification where the secrets of any large organisation are concerned, and in particular the State. That is that the State’s secrets belong ultimately to the citizens of the State, to us, and any secrets which are kept from us by those we delegate as custodians of secrets – government and officials – these State secrets must be carefully constrained by publicly known rules, by circumstances, by place and by time. Having the time limit on a secret, in particular, is not only in the public interest, but it is also a very healthy check on unacceptable behaviour by those with state power.

Similarly, the decision as to when such secrets should be disclosed to the public, should not be left just to the government and official custodians, but should be influenced by others who do not have the same potential self-interest in maintaining secrecy. These others should include parliament, public interest groups, and of course the media.

There is inevitably therefore a grey zone in State secrecy, when something that has been a secret is faced with disclosure, and a decision has to be made whether such disclosure is now in the public interest.

It is in that grey zone that I spend my working life, and it is this that Barry White has asked me to come and discuss with you this evening. So I am going to start by talking about my own role, and then go on to make comments about some National Security matters, as I personally see them. I made similar comments to the Freedom Forum last Autumn, but some things have moved on since then.

I have a very strange job indeed. I work in the no-man’s land between 2 quite powerful, and normally battling, armies – the army of officials and the army of the media. My job is to offer advice to, or to offer to negotiate between, these 2 armies. I have an office inside the castle of officialdom, and I can therefore when necessary be privy to some of their kafkaesque dealings and secrets – but I am not responsible to any government department, and I do not therefore speak for them, and I spend just as much time with journalists as I do with officials. I am responsible to an independent committee – the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, still known colloquially as the D-Notice Committee. 13 of the 17 members of the Committee are media representatives; they are mostly managing editor types, from across the spectrum of press and broadcasting; they are fiercely protective of the independent status of the Committee, and of my independent role as the Committee’s servant, and as a servant of the public. The system is of course voluntary, and I have no powers other than those of persuasion; the decision whether or not to use the system at all, and the final decision as to what is published, lie with the editor or publisher. The Committee meets twice a year, and is the only regular forum for senior officials and senior media people to discuss their potential and actual disagreements of principle. In between the meetings, I am left to get on with running things day-to-day, consulting individual members if necessary. I am a one-man band.

The standing Defence Advisory Notices (still colloquially known as the D-Notices) have now been reduced to just 5 in number, and were again revised, and made less restrictive, earlier this year. The details are all on our internet site, (http://www.dnotice.org.uk/). There is nothing mysterious about the system. And there is nothing surprising about the 5 standing notices which very briefly cover military operations, plans, and capabilities; nuclear and non-nuclear weapons and equipment; ciphers and secure communications; sensitive installations and home addresses; and the UK’s security and intelligence services and special forces.

How, in practice, do I get involved? Either I myself become aware of something of potential interest, for example in the booksellers’ guides, or in a breaking news story, and I offer my services. Or a journalist or author or publisher gets in touch with me about something which he or she intends to write or broadcast, and asks for my advice, or asks that I act as an intermediary with officials. Or an official learns of a potential story and asks for my advice, or asks that I act as an intermediary with the media. In the latter case I do not always agree to get involved, for example if I consider that an official is being unjustifiably secretive, or if it is a matter of embarrassment rather than of national security. Which brings me to National Security.

National Security is a term which is frequently used, for example as a justification, or as an exemption in an act or bill – some well known to you include the Terrorism Act, the Data Protection Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and the Freedom of Information Act and the OSA. But National Security is not actually defined anywhere, for 2 main reasons, as far as I can see.

The first is that Government lawyers believe that National Security should be what is called an ‘ambulatory concept’, a general idea to be interpreted, if necessary by the Courts, in the light of the particular and unforeseeable circumstances.

The other main reason that National Security is not defined anywhere is that it is extremely difficulty to do so precisely and concisely, as the 13 experienced journalists and four senior civil servants on my Committee found last year, when they tried to draft a short definition of National Security, to go with the revised Defence Advisory Notices. In the end they fell back on the detailed areas described in the Notices themselves, and they put these Notices in a context of scale, namely ‘involving grave danger to the State and/or individuals’. That deliberately excludes, for example, many matters now covered by the Terrorism Act.

Well, that is all very well, but this closely circumscribed concept of National Security applies only to the work of the D-Notice Committee, and has no legal status; nor is National Security defined anywhere even in the 1989 Official Secrets Act. And here, whereas the D-Notice criterion is that there must actually be damage to National Security, and that applies to all my interventions, that is rather different from the wider criteria in the Official Secrets Act.

So, what can be done to reduce the strife over National Security between officials and media?

You would expect me to believe that resolving disagreements between officialdom and the media is best done using the D-Notice system – cheap, quick and precise – rather than going to law and risking blanket injunctions on stories, police investigations, and prosecutions. Failure by officials, or by the media, to use the D-Notice system usually ends in unnecessary unpleasantness and/or litigation. Of course, one could do without the D-Notice system, but all that would do, in the current climate, is lead to more injunctions and more recourse to the legal system. And I believe that in any area of media activity, a voluntary system is preferable to litigation That is if the voluntary system is applied impartially, and in a liberal-minded way, which is my aim.

But of course the D-Notice system is anyway not itself the problem. Last year we heard much of the general governmental and official culture of secrecy, in particular over BSE. The OSA culture of secrecy is of even longer standing, the Cold War habit of attempting to keep everything secret, rather than just the very few things which really do need to be kept secret, for the time being, to prevent genuine damage, in particular danger to lives, or to current or future operations.

I have to say too that there are faults on the media side, sometimes of sensational inaccuracy, which just makes officials bloody-minded, but more seriously the fault is of a very patchy approach by most of the media to secrecy and freedom of information matters. In the same way that there are allegedly some in Westminster and Whitehall, who believe that nobody outside the M25 cares about trial by jury, there are certainly some in Westminster and Whitehall, who have quite sincerely concluded, that nobody outside the Guardian readership cares much about freedom of information, or reform of the Official Secrets Act.

However, both the media and officialdom, and their associated lawyers, are well aware that the culture of secrecy is now being challenged by a number of court decisions and further cases through this Spring and Summer. We are also now it seems in the run up to the next general election, and, simultaneously, the Government and Parliament and officials have been trying to cope with an existing, unusually heavy, legislative load. This is not the ideal scenario for calm, rational and open debate.

But de facto that debate is under way, if not yet by government, certainly in the media and the courts. Last November, a court in New Zealand ruled against the Ministry of Defence here in what is effectively a test case on the lifelong duty of confidentiality of ex-government servants, in that case an ex-SAS soldier. An appeal against that has been made by the MOD, and a decision is awaited.

Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Sunday Times, albeit with some slight qualifications, in the case of the Richard Tomlinson book. The principle at stake there was fundamentally about when something can be considered to be sufficiently in the public domain to be republished legitimately. I am glad to say that the liberal advice that I had given previously in this respect was consistent with the subsequent Appeal Court ruling.

And this month, in a preliminary hearing in the David Shayler case, the Court ruled that the media should be able to report the court proceedings, and that sensitive official documents should be made available to the defence. And then waiting in the wings are the memoirs of Dame Stella Rimington. So there is a lot going on which is likely to affect how the OSA is handled in future.

One other point, concerning the D-Notice system, but in a wider field. I mentioned the number of places where National Security is quoted, but not defined. Indeed the only concept of National Security currently on any table is that in the 5 standing DA Notices and their Introduction.

At the most recent D-Notice Committee meeting, last November, the media representatives therefore highlighted the potential for confusion, in the minds of the media, if officials involved in enforcing all the Acts which mention National Security interpreted it differently from the D-Notice way. The official representatives on the Committee took the point. They decided that, while the courts must be the ultimate arbiters, the attention of all officials would be drawn to the DA-Notice concept of National Security, at least as the starting point for their decision-making. This in itself will be a mind-shift for officials. Of course, official mind-shifts take time!

Nevertheless, from where I sit, as the servant of the Committee and of the public, it is clear that some change is needed. We need to deal with matters of official secrecy, freedom of information and national security, in a more mature and modern way. I therefore welcome discussions like today’s, and I look forward to continuing to help push things along, both in open debate with the media and lawyers, and behind the scenes with officials.

The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee is concerned only with matters which gravely endanger National Security, especially where this concerns lives and operations. The Official Secrets Act is applicable more widely, and is not my direct responsibility, and it is not for me to comment publicly on it.

So far as the Defence Advisory Notices are concerned, anything which is put on the internet is ipso facto in the public domain. However, there might be very occasional circumstances in which I would nevertheless ask the media to consider not immediately publishing something which was on the net.

For example, if I learned that someone had just put, on a little-known website, the identity of an active MI5 or MI6 officer, or that of one of their agents, and that this identification endangered his or her life, then I might ask the media not to broadcast further the information, or the web address, at least until the officer or agent had been moved rapidly to a safe place.

Such a short term delay might literally be the difference between life and death, especially taking into consideration, firstly, how difficult it can be to find something on the net unless one knows what one is looking for, and roughly where to find it; secondly, that not all foreign and terrorist intelligence organisations are always very quick and efficient, nor comprehensive in their cover.

But I emphasise that such a request to the media would only be made by me in such unusual, temporary and dangerous circumstances."

National Security

The media do get something in return for the D-Notice System, argues Nick Wilkinson

D for disclosure

Richard Ayre clearly felt out of place when he was a member of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (Press Gazette, 10.11.00), but he is now four years out of date. The environment in which I operate as the Secretary is changing, and some of what he writes is no longer completely accurate, if it ever was.

The number of standing D Notices (strictly speaking now Defence Advisory Notices) was reduced in May to five, covering in essence present and future military operations, weapon systems performance, cryptography, sensitive sites, and the Secret and Security Services. Nothing unexpected about that, and the list of matters under those headings which are still considered sensitive is also now more limited. Weapon stockpiles and aerial photography of security establishments, for example, are no longer included. For the D-Notice Secretary to be interested, the criterion of damage to national security (not political or official embarrassment) also has to be met. This damage is most commonly danger to ongoing operations and/or to the lives of agents or of the public.

In redrafting the D-Notices, an attempt was made to define national security in a few words, but even the combined skills of this independent Committee’s 13 experienced media representatives and 4 senior civil servants could not produce a form of words any more concise and precise than the D Notices themselves. However, they put the Notices in a context of grave danger to the State and/or individuals. This upper level of threat excludes, for example, many activities now potentially covered by the Terrorism Act.

These changes to the Notices were inspired not by the security services, as alleged by Richard Ayre, but by the media representatives, and they give journalists, broadcasters, editors, authors, publishers and others (and, of course, officials) much clearer guidance than before on the precise areas where they should consider taking advice. Of course, some very experienced writers and broadcasters need very little advice. They know their specialist subjects well, and know (often better than officials) what is already in the public domain. And very few in the media want genuinely and knowingly to endanger operations or lives. But even the most experienced do not always know everything which at that moment is current, and the D-Notice system provides the media with a quick, easy and free way of checking.

Another benefit which the system provides to the media is a way of avoiding litigation, which is the only alternative, and one which officials have shown they are ready to use when alarmed that national security is (in their view) about to be breached. In my year in office, I have already seen several examples of where use of the D-Notice system has either headed off, or could have headed off, injunctions. And when injunctions are granted by the Courts, they tend to have a blanket effect on stopping a story, whereas the D-Notice system is concerned usually only with detail, for example a name or a current technique.

There is nothing ‘mysterious’ about the way the system operates. Sometimes I take the initiative myself, prompted for example by a publisher’s advertisement or a breaking news story, or I am asked for advice or to act as a mediator by a journalist/writer or an official. The media reveal to me as much or as little as they want, and I check with them how much I can reveal to officials. Often I know enough to make a judgement myself on whether something would actually damage national security, but, if not, I have the necessary high security clearances to investigate. I am just as likely to tell an official he is being unjustifiably secretive, as to tell a journalist he is being inadvisably revelatory (it is almost always ‘he’ in both cases).

Richard Ayre says that ‘alerting the admiral’ – almost always an admiral – ‘to your scoop story, and then following his advice and editing bits out, won’t even earn you a promise that you won’t be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act’. In fact, your scoop remains your scoop, it does not go to a rival; and nor can anything which the D-Notice Secretary, with your agreement, tells officials in confidence about the story, be used against you subsequently. I do advise journalists if I suspect that something they intend to write may be in breach of the OSA or injunctions (although I am not privy to the latter) – not my job strictly speaking, and not foolproof, but I hope it is also helpful to the media. But the decision as to whether to publish remains with the editor or publisher, and the decision whether to go to litigation is entirely a decision for the relevant Ministry, based either on what has been published or on other sources they may have, not on what may be known to the D-Notice Secretary.

The pamphlet which Richard Ayre’s article plugs has a specific recommendation which I will plug for him:
"Recommendation 12: The DA Notice system should be dismantled The system as presently constituted should be dismantled. Any future security advisory system must be strictly voluntary and not a response to oppressive secrecy or other security laws. Where the press makes use of this system and receives an indication that no damage to national security is threatened by a given story, this outcome should be able to guarantee that there will be no subsequent adverse consequences as a result of publication."

The present system could of course easily be dismantled if the media side so wished, but, at present and as now revised, it still does have benefits to disclosure by them, as outlined by me above. It is already ‘strictly voluntary’. Many foreign journalists acknowledge that they have no such buffer against the draconian use of legislation. If the D-Notice system were used in every case, with its tightly drawn concept of national security, there would be far less danger of ‘adverse consequences’.

I am sorry that Richard Ayre was turned off by his time as a member of the D-Notice Committee. He clearly equates ‘grim men in dark suits …… wearing a poppy’ with establishment power, whereas I suspect it was no more than the image which Managing Editors felt they should project in the early 1990s. As it happened, five minutes after I read his article, I found myself sitting as a panellist at a Freedom Forum conference, part sponsored by his own Article 19. Alongside me was David Shayler. He was wearing a dark suit and a poppy.

Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson has been D-Notice Secretary since November 1999. Full details of the system on http://www.dnotice.org.uk/.

I have been asked to start by talking very briefly about my job as the D-Notice Secretary, and I will then go on to make comments about some National Security matters, as I personally see them.

I have a very strange job indeed. I work in the no-man’s land between 2 quite powerful, and normally battling, armies – the army of officials and the army of the media. My job is to offer advice to, or to offer to negotiate between, these 2 armies. I have an office inside the castle of officialdom, and I can therefore when necessary be privy to some of their kafkaesque dealings and secrets – but I am not responsible to any government department, and I do not therefore speak for them, and I spend just as much time with journalists as I do with officials. I am responsible to an independent committee, 13 of whose 17 members are media representatives; they are fiercely protective of the independent status of the Committee, and of my independent role as the Committee’s servant, and as a servant of the public. The system is of course voluntary, and I have no powers other than those of persuasion; the decision whether or not to use the system at all, and the final decision as to what is published, lie with the editor or publisher.

The standing Defence Advisory Notices have now been reduced to just 5 in number, and were again revised, and made less restrictive, earlier this year. The details are all on our internet site. There is nothing mysterious about the system.

How, in practice, do I get involved? Either I myself become aware of something of potential interest, for example in the bookseller’s guides, or in a breaking news story, and I offer my services. Or a journalist or author or publisher gets in touch with me about something which he or she intends to write or broadcast, and asks for my advice, or asks that I act as an intermediary with officials. Or an official learns of a potential story and asks for my advice, or asks that I act as an intermediary with the media. In the latter case I do not always agree to get involved, for example if I consider that an official is being unjustifiably secretive, or if it is a matter of embarrassment rather than of national security. Which brings me to National Security.

National Security is a term which is frequently used, for example as a justification, or as an exemption in an act or bill – some well known to you include the Terrorism Act, the Data Protection Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and the Freedom of Information Bill. But National Security is not actually defined anywhere, for 2 main reasons, as far as I can see.

The first is that Government lawyers believe that National Security should be what is called an ‘ambulatory concept’, a general idea to be interpreted if necessary by the Courts, in the light of the particular and unforeseeable circumstances.

The other main reason that National Security is not defined anywhere is that it is extremely difficulty to do so precisely and concisely, as the 13 experienced journalists and four senior civil servants on my Committee found earlier this year, when they tried to draft a definition of National Security, to go with the revised Defence Advisory Notices. In the end they fell back on the detailed areas described in the Notices themselves, and they put these Notices in a context of scale, namely ‘involving grave danger to the State and/or individuals’. That deliberately excludes, for example, many matters now covered by the Terrorism Act.

Well, that is all very well, but this closely circumscribed concept of National Security applies only to the work of the D-Notice Committee, and has no legal status; nor is National Security defined anywhere in the 1989 Official Secrets Act. And whereas the D-Notice criterion is that there must actually be damage to National Security, and that applies to all my interventions, that is rather different from the criteria in the Official Secrets Act.

So, what can be done to reduce the strife between officials and media?

You would expect me to believe that resolving disagreements between officialdom and the media is best done using the D-Notice system – cheap, quick and precise – rather than going to law and risking blanket injunctions on stories, police investigations, and prosecutions. Failure by officials, or by the media, to use the D-Notice system usually ends in unnecessary unpleasantness. Of course, one could do without the D-Notice system, but all that would do, in the current climate, is lead to more injunctions and more recourse to the legal system. And I believe that in any area of media activity, a voluntary system is preferable t litigation That is if the voluntary system is applied impartially, and in a liberal-minded way, which is my aim.

But the D-Notice system is anyway not the problem. In recent weeks we have heard much of the BSE culture of secrecy. The OSA culture of secrecy is of even longer standing, the Cold War habit of attempting to keep everything secret, rather than just the very few things which really do need to be kept secret, for the time being, to prevent genuine damage, in particular danger to lives, or to current or future operations.

I have to say that there are faults on the media side too, sometimes of sensational inaccuracy, which just makes officials bloody-minded, but more seriously the fault is of a very patchy approach by most of the media to secrecy and freedom of information matters. In the same way that there are allegedly some in Westminster and Whitehall, who believe that nobody outside the M25 cares about trial by jury, there are certainly some in Westminster and Whitehall, who have quite sincerely concluded, that nobody outside the Guardian readership cares much about freedom of information, or reform of the Official Secrets Act.

However, both the media and officialdom, and their associated lawyers, are well aware that the culture of secrecy is now being challenged by a number of court cases and other events this Autumn through to Spring. During this same period, we shall all possibly be in the run up to the next general election, and, simultaneously, the Government and Parliament and officials are trying to cope with an existing, unusually heavy, legislative load. This is not the ideal scenario for calm, rational and open debate.

Nevertheless, from where I sit, as the servant of the Committee and of the public, it is clear that some change is needed. We need to deal with matters of official secrecy, freedom of information and national security, in a more mature and modern way. I therefore welcome discussions like today’s, and I look forward to helping push things along, both in open debate with the media and lawyers, and behind the scenes with officials.

My part of the Public Interest jigsaw concerns just National Security, and, as National Security is one of the broad exemptions in the draft Freedom of Information Bill, perhaps I should not be on this platform discussing something which I am not part of. However, National Security is a term which is often used, but rarely defined - and it is certainly not defined in a way which is acceptable, both to the most paranoid civil servant, and at the same time to the most libertarian journalist. Even defining national security for a middle of the road consensus is very difficult, but that in fact is what the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee is currently trying to do, for the purposes of the DA-Notice system. The Committee, I remind you, consists on the official side of 4 very senior civil servants from the Home Office, Foreign Office, and Ministry of Defence, and on the media side of 13 senior representatives from diverse organisations. I hope that, at our next 6-monthly meeting, in 12 days' time, we will achieve a definition of National Security which is acceptable all round. The system being voluntary, this definition will have no legal status per se, but it will certainly be relevant to perceptions of national security across the board. More of that relevance in a moment.

In my area of work, there are two main elements of public interest - the right to know what is going on, and the occasionally conflicting right that some public activities should be kept secret for the time being, for example, some of the measures to protect the public against terrorists.

Few people disagree with those two aspects of public interest at the extremes, but they certainly do disagree in interpretations in the grey area in between. This grey area has been enlarged in recent years by the Secret Intelligence Service and Security Service being given some degree of new responsibilities for activities outside their traditional National Security roles, and the grey area is potentially now being enlarged further by much of the new information and security legislation currently being pushed through.

As I have said, National Security is one of the categories of exemption mentioned in the Freedom of Information Bill, but, in this context, what is National Security? - and what is anyway covered by the Official Secrets Act?

Without going on the record with my views on the current state of the Freedom of Information Bill, it is clear that there are still such divergent views on Freedom of Information, that there is plenty of room for disagreement between officials and media in the coming years on National Security matters. I expect, therefore, that the new Information Commissioner and I will have to talk from time to time, to ensure that officials in my area are not being unnecessarily secretive, and that where exemptions are upheld, they are properly justified.

The new Terrorism Bill is another where there is controversial change. It widens the definition of terrorism potentially to include groups and activities which do not normally threaten National Security in the commonly and traditionally understood sense. I can tell you, however, that as far as the activities of my Committee and myself are concerned, we will be sticking with "Old Terrorism", ie matters which affect the public security in a macro sense.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill is another in which undefined National Security is specifically mentioned, for example as a justification for issuing warrants. Here again I see plenty of room for disagreement in interpretation between officials, activists and the media. I can imagine the occasional situation in which the media reveal some use of the surveillance powers in the Bill, surveillance which allegedly has a National Security justification, but which does not, however, match up to the more narrow criteria in the Defence Advisory Notices. Maybe I will, therefore, also occasionally be having conversations with the Chairman of the proposed Investigatory Powers Complaints Tribunal.

The new Data Protection Act does not make National Security an absolute exemption, but it too does provide a special Tribunal, to consider refusals by Agencies to disclose, for reasons of national security.

And then there is the old favourite, the Official Secrets Act. Again without going on the record with my views about the Official Secrets Act, I can tell you that there are officials who think the current Act is creaking, and who would liken to see changes to it - not always, needless to say, the same changes as the media would like to see. What does seem likely, however, is that Section 1 of the Act at least (which deals with the Secret Intelligence and Security Services) may be one of many areas of English and Welsh activity which will see change, through the Courts or through Legislation, when the Human Rights Act comes into force on 2 October, and when it may become necessary in any litigation to prove actual damage to National Security.

So, in the field of National Security, I am looking forward to a few interesting years as the DA-Notice Secretary, during which time I expect to see the new rules tested by the public and by the media, in the corridors of power and in the UK and European Courts, perhaps even in Parliament. And we must not forget that it is not just what is in the laws themselves that matters, but also in how, when and by whom they are used and abused.

Meanwhile, I hope that shortly after the meeting on 17 May of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, I will be able to publish to Editors a set of revised DA-Notices, which will number 5 instead of 6, which will include a definition of National Security, and which will have a number of other textual revisions which make them slightly clearer for journalists, editors and others to use.

Please do make use of the benefits of the DA-Notice system where appropriate - it is of course voluntary, but negotiation by me between the media and the officials must be preferable to litigation, especially as litigation tends to be slow and expensive and to end in blanket suppression of a story or source, rather than removal of just a few details.

My job remains to advise the media on removal from publication of only the minimum necessary, to prevent genuine serious National Security damage to operations or individuals. My job also remains to help the main story which you wish to publish to go out, in the public interest. And that DA-Notice function will not change, whatever changes there may be in Freedom of Information or other legislation.