Secrecy bill under scrutiny

The ANC has agreed to reconsider its proposed definition of the "national security" that the controversial secrecy bill currently before a parliamentary committee is intended to defend.

After half a day of vigorous debate in the ad hoc committee on the Protection of Information Bill, ANC negotiator Luwellyn Landers asked for time to reconsider the inclusion of so-called information peddling among activities the proposed law would seek to prevent.

IFP delegate Mario Ambrosini had argued that information peddling was not mentioned in major dictionaries and appeared on the internet almost exclusively in references to the current South African debate.

Cecil Burgess, chairman of the ad hoc committee and of parliament's joint standing committee on intelligence, offered a definition of information peddling as a deliberate attempt to mislead state security services with the intention of destabilising the country.

He said efforts to mislead intelligence agencies were a common threat to African governments and that South Africa had survived such efforts only because of its strong democracy.

The DA's Dene Smuts said it was absurd that the intelligence community needed to be "babied" with legal protection against attempts to mislead it.

She said it was the business of intelligence agents to assess the validity of information offered to it by its sources in the same way that MPs and journalists had to evaluate information given to them before acting. Smuts pointed out also that clause 40 of the bill specifically criminalised the provision of "false or fabricated" information to a national intelligence structure.

Members of the DA, the IFP and the African Christian Democratic Party have argued consistently to narrow the scope of the secrecy bill and to limit the reasons that can be used to justify the classification of state information as secret.