Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.
When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.
And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.
Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.
The Scottish Government has today, at the last possible moment, complied with the Scottish Information Commissioner’s order to release its legal advice relating to refusing alert Wings reader Benjamin Harrop’s FOI request for evidence submitted to the Hamilton inquiry into the government’s failed conspiracy against Alex Salmond.
(References to “FOISA” below mean the Freedom Of Information (Scotland) Act.)
Central to the advice is the role of the head of Hamilton’s “secretariat”, a group of civil servants seconded to him by the Scottish Government – in the specific form of the Deputy First Minister at the time, John Swinney – to work on the case, and in particular the question of their potential conflicts of interest as people who were reporting to government ministers in the course of their day jobs as well as supposedly being completely independent while working for Hamilton.
(That last redaction is intriguingly lengthy.)
The identity of those people might be thought a matter of significant public interest for all manner of reasons, so if that were to be overridden and their names redacted, you’d think those preparing documents would be extra-cautious about making the redactions impenetrable.
So bearing that in mind, readers might be forgiven for wondering how many senior female civil servants working within the Scottish Government have names that could fit into these little black boxes.
And they might also conceivably find themselves pondering whether it was the same rather short name that goes in here.
And indeed the one mentioned on page 4 above.
We do however know that the Scottish Government was very keen to prevent this person’s name from being known. A question was asked in Parliament by Fergus Ewing this year relating to the contentious redactions from the Hamilton report and who might have been involved in them.
It was answered by Shona Robison with an very ambiguously-worded response.
When Robison says “none of THOSE civil servants was a Special Adviser” (our emphasis), she could be validly semantically interpreted to mean the four “additional” lower-grade ones only, or she could be including them PLUS the “one individual” previously appointed. If it was the former, then it follows that the individual COULD be a Special Adviser.
The second part of the highlighted sentence, in which Robison ostensibly denies the involvement of Special Advisers in redacting the report is also carefully unclear if examined properly. The parameters of “involved in the process of deciding” are wide, subjective and ill-defined, as hinted at by the Scottish Government’s own lead advocate in the attempt to conceal the requested evidence, James Mure KC.
Other things can also be a tricky business, so Wings draws no conclusions and makes no implications from this information and is merely noting that which has been released in official public-domain documents. Interested readers must assess it for themselves and reach their own views.
The released document also reveals that there was considerable concern among the Scottish Government’s legal advisers that appealing the Information Commissioner’s original decision that the evidence should be published carried significant risks, both of setting a precedent for future cases and of the release of “highly sensitive information” regarding the Hamilton report.
This concern also extended to John Swinney, ultimate keeper of the black pen.
And – despite the fact that the Scottish Government’s lead counsel did NOT in actuality think “the prospects of appeal favourable in principle”:
– the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, nevertheless chose to recommend proceeding (although she did not indicate any greater expectation of success than James Mure KC had).
In summary, then: the Scottish Government was advised that appealing had only a modest chance of succeeding and carried serious risks in the event of losing, but was so desperate to avoid publishing the evidence given to Hamilton that it went ahead anyway (and lost, in humiliatingly rapid fashion).
Meanwhile, it continues to seek to conceal the identity of a key figure in the Hamilton report, the head of his secretariat, whose impartiality and actions in the matter were both questioned by the Scottish Government’s own lead counsel, despite the fact that there is no ostensible reason why a civil servant seconded to a public Ministerial Code inquiry ought to be afforded anonymity.
This is a story which has only begun to unfold. Stay tuned, readers.
