/ 9 March 2012

Lockdown: Closing the research space

Lockdown: Closing The Research Space

Next week the National Council of Provinces will hold the last of its public hearings on the Protection of State Information Bill when it convenes in Cape Town on Tuesday and Wednesday (see “Public consultation on Bill”, Page 39).

The Bill, which will probably be passed into law later this year, will require the organs of state that comprise the security cluster — the police, the military and the intelligence services — to classify documents and will criminalise their unauthorised disclosure.

Unjustifiable secrecy in the security cluster is dangerous, because it creates space for the abuse of the coercive capacities of the state. So, if the Bill in its current form becomes law, what would be the likely consequences for the freedom of academics to undertake teaching and research on the cluster — that is, on university contributions that could assist in holding this most sensitive area of government to account?

In interviews with me, several academics researching the security cluster said there was too little academic work on the cluster already, leading to yawning knowledge gaps. Abel Esterhuyse of the University of Stellenbosch’s faculty of military science has even referred to the discipline of strategic studies as being close to its demise.

The reasons for the paucity of work are complex. Esterhuyse recounted how academics were heavily involved in the drafting of the white paper on defence in 1996, which he described as a consultative process. The current defence review, however, has undergone no such process.

Esterhuyse said: “The public doesn’t know about the processes. Academics have been pushed out of the system, which is being run by military bureaucrats. It’s fascinating to see how academics have been shut down.

“There’s a fear in the defence force, a new-found fear, which is not so much fear that state secrets will become known but that bureaucratic ineptitude will become exposed. We have seen our body of knowledge shrinking and the number of people involved is fading away. We are losing our knowledge in this domain.”

Esterhuyse attributed this fear of scrutiny to a growing anti-intellectualism in the military, which is operationally and tactically minded, not strategically minded. As a result, politicians are left to make the strategic decisions on matters such as troop deployment relatively unchallenged, which, according to Esterhuyse, has led to overdeployment.

At the same time, military leaders also lack the strategic language to mount convincing arguments for more resources, forcing the military to do more with less and turning it into a pressure cooker of discontent.

Anti-intellectualism has led to strained relations between the military and the university, and the military may even sever its relations with the university. But, for Esterhuyse, “militaries can train alone, but they cannot educate alone”.

Stellenbosch University’s Lindy Heinecken, associate professor in the department of sociology and social anthropology, has noted a rapid politicisation of the military driven by what she described as an authoritarian, intelligence-minded and controlling minister of defence.

“Politically minded generals are appointing military-minded colonels,” Heinecken said, “but they cannot do their jobs because they are so frustrated with political interference right down to unit level. [As a politician] you need to make sure that your army is close to you.”

Heinecken conceded that the military had become more open to outside scrutiny than in the past and that, largely, she was able to secure the military’s co-operation for research projects, but she said: “I say that with caution, because it depends on who you know. For me it has been a long, bumpy road to get where I am.”

She and Esterhuyse have encountered classified information that should rightfully be in the public domain. Esterhuyse has even seen newspaper articles that are classified by virtue of the bulk classification of particular categories of documents.

Both academics have devised strategies to access information in spite of the culture of overclassification. Military officers will often speak readily, but off the record.

Furthermore, they will show the researchers classified documents but not allow anything in them to be quoted. Both researchers avoid asking for security clearance for projects, because this would allow the military to cherry-pick projects it finds palatable.

According to Heinecken, the South African Defence Force has statistics on HIV prevalence and tests its members annually. This information could yield rich data on how the infection rate is changing, but she has had to resort to using the death statistics of defence force members to plot infection trends because the HIV-prevalence statistics are classified.

Policing researchers have experienced similar frustrations. The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Monique Marks noted that the best policing work is taking place outside of universities. Marks specialises in ethnographic work on policing culture, including “ethnographic immersion” research — that is, “deep hanging out” with police members, as she put it.

She had established a trust relationship with them that allowed her unprecedented access to information, she said. She has been lucky; permission has been denied to other researchers who are seen as too critical of the police and therefore threatening. But even Marks has experienced a lockdown on policing information recently. For the first time, in 2009, the South African Police Service denied her access to undertake research on roadblocks — although the eThekwini police were more forthcoming, she said.

Another researcher who has experienced the police closing ranks is undertaking postgraduate research on the policing of gangs in the Western Cape. He requested anonymity. Like Esterhuyse, the student has interacted with many police officers who are willing to speak, but not to hand over classified documents. He attributed this reluctance to their embarrassment at having to acknowledge that they lacked proper planning documents.

On one occasion, though, he was given a classified document recording a decision that the provincial government would not negotiate with gangs. Yet the then minister, Dullah Omar, had decided that the government would do so and the document therefore suggested a disjuncture between national and provincial policy.

The student traced the hostility to research scrutiny he encountered to former police national commissioner Jackie Selebi who, in his words, “didn’t want us to do research, so access was closed down. At a stage in our history when we need to examine policing completely, especially in the light of [the] militarisation of the police, we are not going to get information we need to do this if we go this way.”

This new culture of secrecy also prevents key decisions from being scrutinised. According to the student: “When they brought the defence force back into the policing of gangs, no one approved that.”

Little academic work is taking place on the intelligence sector. The University of Pretoria offers courses and its academics have supervised postgraduate students in this area.

Some of their students are drawn from the intelligence community. Yet the university’s Professor Sandy Africa of the political sciences department said there was no dedicated network of researchers on the intelligence sector.

Africa maintains that the transition to democracy has opened up unprecedented spaces for research on intelligence matters. In her words, “the space isn’t a closed space”, although it remains largely unexplored, mainly because “we haven’t pushed the envelope”. Furthermore, the fact that the Bill aims to usher in a systematic method of declassification will be an advance, she said.

Like Heinecken, Esterhuyse and Marks, Africa felt that research into organisational culture was critical. But for Africa such research will be as difficult under the Bill, once it becomes law, as it is under the Cabinet guidelines now in force — the “minimum information security standards”.

The intelligence services are highly stressful environments that skew and strain gender and labour relations. “One wants to see the culture changing,” Africa said. “[The intelligence services] have a hierarchical culture, which is not a culture that lends itself to questioning. Decisions are taken in a very executive-driven way, very controlled.

Top management find themselves estranged and marginalised. If that is the cultural set-up at the top, you can imagine how difficult it is for people at lower levels to cope. Innovation is stifled.”

All these academics recognised the need for the security cluster to keep operational information secret. But information relating to strategy, such as the intelligence service’s strategic objectives, should be public.

In Marks’s experience: “How they define [operational secrets] is extremely broad, leading to a lot of discretion being applied. The police are going to pin a lot of stuff on operational privacy.” She suggested that they were petrified of politicians and “don’t want stuff coming out”.

For Esterhuyse: “Our military has an inability to distinguish between operational and strategic intelligence. You need a certain amount of secrecy to protect operational issues, but strategic issues require more debate and should be open. Otherwise we risk returning to the deep-security state of the 1980s. They will simply classify everything. If you ask them to justify their decisions, they will classify everything in terms of operational security.”

The picture that emerges is of a security cluster that routinely overclassifies information and listens largely to what it wants to hear. The cluster’s internal capacity to make inputs on strategic matters has been stripped away, making it highly susceptible to political influence. The culture of self-reflection needed for the cluster to become a learning organisation has been whittled away.

Furthermore, according to Heinecken, the civil-military divide is growing. Yet, at the same time, there is growing evidence of inappropriate deployments of the military in civilian life. The tendency to classify strategic documents on these matters, and more, is particularly worrying, because it makes public debate on the cluster’s strategic priorities difficult. As a result, public oversight cannot function effectively.

It is likely that these trends will intensify if the Bill is promulgated in its current form. In spite of the fact that the Bill’s classification criteria are much stricter than the Cabinet’s “minimum information security standards”, documents that should rightfully be in the public domain will probably continue to be defined as operational documents and shoehorned into the new classification criteria on that basis. The Bill authorises bulk classification and this will undoubtedly continue the culture of overclassification.

If a researcher either applies for declassification, including after having come into the possession of a classified document and having returned it, or chooses to go through the internal appeal process, these processes are unlikely to result in different classification decisions because the cluster’s political leadership is clearly intent on keeping key strategic documents secret.

The fact that the Bill makes it possible for academics to be prosecuted for the possession and onward disclosure of documents and that it includes no public interest or public domain defences is likely to scare off many prospective researchers, shrinking the already small pool of academic work on the cluster. The cluster should take responsibility for keeping documents secret and not academics or society as a whole.

When taken together, these factors predispose the South Africa state to securitisation, and society to militarisation. However, citizens have often failed insist on access to information, especially on intelligence matters, tending to assume that such information should lie outside the public domain.

Unless civil society and academia stand up and claim what should rightfully be public, the slow march to a national security state becomes possible and, in a global context of recession and heightened anti-capitalist struggle, even likely.

Professor Jane Duncan holds the Highway Africa chair of media and information society located in the school of journalism and media studies at Rhodes University

Public consultation on Bill
The National Council of Provinces’ ad hoc committee on the Protection of State Information Bill started its public consultations on the Bill in January. Since meetings at two venues in the Western Cape that month, it has moved through the other eight provinces.

The Cape Town Parliament hearings the committee will convene next week, on March 13 and 14, will conclude these public consultations.

“The committee aims to provide an opportunity for every section of the South African population to be given the opportunity to engage on the Bill with the committee publicly,” it said when it announced the schedule of hearings. “All individuals and organisations will be able to make their inputs at the public hearings.”

For more information, including a description of how anyone can express his views through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, go to parliament.gov.za. — David Macfarlane