ABSTRACT
The Official Secrets Act, originally passed by Parliament in 1911, is the main source of state control over secrecy and espionage in Britain. Compared with many Western nations it is very powerful, and can be used to protect sensitive information that the government of the day does not want disclosed, even though the information hardly challenges the security of the state. Once one has signed the Act, and this can be required before quite trivial information is disclosed, one is permanently bound by it. Lengthy prison sentences can be, and have been, handed down under the Act, and from time to time journalists engaged in quite proper investigative reporting are restricted by it. Since the 1970s it has become increasingly unpopular and discredited, and several parliamentary attempts have been made, unsuccessfully, to abolish or amend it. By contrast the USA not only has no equivalent of the Official Secrets Act, but in 1966 passed the Freedom of Information Act. Access to information in the USA is so much more open than in the UK that British journalists sometimes find it easier to discover what their own government is doing by reading American government documents. The UK's equivalent of a freedom of information act, legislated at the beginning of the 21st century is nowhere near as far-reaching as the American equivalent, and no liberalization of the Official Secrets Act is probable.
