19 May 2016
The BBC – Not Quite Gentlemen
Eavesdropping on private conversations should be a no-no
By John Watson
Take two cases. In one, a male celebrity cavorts in a bed with two other men. Once the press get hold of the story, an injunction is issued and the identity of the men cannot be reported in the UK because of concerns about infringing the right of privacy and the effect which newspaper coverage might have on one of the men’s children. That injunction is currently being challenged and a ruling from the Supreme Court is due today. That is the first case.
The second is quite different. In a private conversation with a police commander at a garden party, the Queen comments that Chinese officials were very rude to the British ambassador to Beijing prior to last year’s state visit by President Xi Jinping. The conversation is recorded on a microphone used by the BBC’s Will Wilkinson and spotted at the BBC when they go through the tape. What do they do then? Ignore the conversation on the basis that it was private? Ask the palace whether they can reveal it? No, they broadcast it, jeopardising the UK’s relationship with an important trading partner. Luckily the words used were probably too anodyne to do any real damage.
It is certainly a little odd. There is litigation a plenty about whether philandering media personalities should be able to keep their grubby proceedings private, yet the law has nothing to say about the leaking of a perfectly innocent private conversation by someone who happens to overhear it, possibly to the national detriment. How can that be right? Well, as the Supreme Court is to unveil its views on the three in a bed case at 9.30 this morning, there is no point in our talking about that. So let’s look at the second topic: privacy in the context of confidential communications.
Reading other people’s post has always been sneered at. “Not the act of a gentleman” they used to say in Victorian times. “Alright if you are part of the security services, I suppose,” might be the modern equivalent. Still, whatever the language, peoples’ post has always been regarded as private and looking at it surreptitiously as something which is just not done, rather like looking at them through the keyhole when they’re climbing into or out of the bath. It was dislike for this sort of thing which added fuel to the phone-hacking scandal. True, mobile phone calls are a more recent innovation than the letter, but still, the principle is much the same. They are private, and generally that privacy should be protected. Fair enough, as far as it goes, but looking at the morality of it, how exactly does listening in on a private conversation differ from hacking someone’s phone?
Ah, you might say, the conversation was only overheard accidentally. The first that the BBC heard about it was when they listened to the recording in their studio. We have all faced that dilemma and the answer to it is perfectly obvious. In the same way that if you discover that you have accidentally opened someone else’s letter you stop reading it, if you become aware that you are overhearing something private you walk away from the door and try to forget what you have heard. Of course there are exceptions to that. If you hear a criminal offence being discussed or a plot against the state, your civic duty may be more important than good manners and you may feel obliged to report what you have heard. In this case the BBC had none of those excuses. They published the conversation to boost their ratings, effectively selling their knowledge for commercial advantage. I’m sure there is a word for that somewhere and I don’t suppose it is a particular nice one.
This isn’t the only leak of this type to occur recently, however. Mr Cameron, in a conversation with the Queen, referred to Afghanistan and Nigeria as being “fantastically corrupt” and this time it was his turn to be overheard. Luckily, again little damage seems to have been done, Presidents Ghani and Buhari being prepared to go along with the line that this was the very corruption they are fighting against. But it isn’t always going to end like that. Of course, in an ideal world, politicians would always be discreet, but there will be moments in private conversations when they are not. Sooner or later some comment is going to be revealed which really does damage the national interest spectacularly, and the sight of a cheeky chappie from the BBC jumping gleefully in the air babbling about how it has put their viewing figures up is going to be scant consolation to the public.
The current position is unstable, and something needs to be done about it before there is a disaster. Rules need to be made, and they need to be enforced with the same rigour as those against hacking. People – be they officials, politicians, businessmen or even celebrities – should be able to talk freely amongst themselves with confidence that no third party eavesdropper will listen in and then publish their words. Otherwise they always have to keep their conversations guarded, within the bounds of what is currently regarded as acceptable, and radical ideas, often the ones that really do need to be aired, will be excluded.
Actually, in the public sector the need for reform to encourage open debate goes further than that. Under the Freedom of Information Act, official papers and correspondence can be accessed by commentators. To a point it is possible to live with that at the price of accepting that some discussions are too sensitive to put on paper or in the minutes. Still, it is a dishonest price because it depends on the concealment of what was actually said. All right as a way of keeping the noses of the press out, perhaps, but hardly conducive to good administration.
We hear a lot about safe spaces at the moment. As sponsored by the student movement, these seem to be places in which sensitive individuals can be sure that they won’t be offended. That makes them intellectually sterile, somewhere where views cannot be freely traded. The requirements of good government mean that another form of safe space is needed. These will be the antithesis of their namesake, forums in which all sorts of views can be expressed with complete freedom and full confidence that they will stay confidential. They can be in Whitehall or at the Palace. They can be in the Universities or on the web. Chatham House already has a system which seems to work well. The really important point, however, is that people should know that when they are expressing their views, they can be frank. That depends on the discussion being secure.
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