Official Secrets Act

The Official Secrets Act (OSA) is basically an act which prohibits the disclosure of official documents and information. Although it targets spying, all prosecutions that have taken place since it came about in 1935 have fallen under section 5. Section 5 is about the “wrongful communication...of information”; more precisely it states as an offence the disclosure of information to unauthorised parties. Article 5 (1) (ii), moreover, counts it as an offence when the information is used “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interests of Singapore”.

In its history, the OSA has only been used once against the press, in 1994. This case, however, caused a considerable amount of uproar, especially from the foreign press. Debate poured forth on press freedom, as well as on the role of investigative journalism.

In this case, the then director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) economics department, Tharman Shamugaratnam, was charged with compromising the secrecy of a piece of information – specifically, the official flash estimates of Singapore’s economic growth in the second quarter of 1992. This information was communicated to Bhaskaran, an economist from a broking firm, who had then told it to, among others, the Business Times senior correspondent Kenneth James. From James, the flash estimate was e-mailed to several Business Times colleagues, including the Business Times editor, Patrick Daniel. An article in the Business Times then communicated this figure before it was officially released. Daniel was charged with communicating the information to "unauthorised persons, namely, the readers of the Business Times". What followed was an inquiry by the Internal Security Department. Finally, all five accused were found guilty and fined.

This case attracted a lot of attention from the foreign press, which started to ask questions about press freedom in Singapore and how this might be a trivialising of what really constitutes a secret ('Trivial Secrets’, The Wall Street Journal, 2 December 1994). The government maintained, however, that this was more of a matter of principle than anything else; significance is attached to the act of leaking rather than what was leaked and the severity of the leak. Attorney General Chan Sek Keong, in fact, said that this prosecution was launched “to establish a principle”. Accordingly, the government’s act of plugging the leak was therefore one to show its ability to respond as well as its “right to control what information is made public” ('Singapore Journalists charged with violating Secrets Law’, Los Angeles Times, 25 February 1994).

Interestingly, this also led to the government writing to the foreign press about its position. SR Nathan, then Ambassador to Washington, said in his letter to the editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, “The Singapore government will not allow anyone to use the excuse of ‘aggressive reporting’ or the needs of ‘the information age’ to divulge classified information. The fact that 'Singapore is hardly leaking all over the place’ is because we plug leaks whenever they occur... . Americans have grown used to frequent leaks of sensitive official information. ... Singapore is not following that American model.” (‘Singapore Must Plug Leaks Quickly’, The Wall Street Journal, 2 March 1994).

In general, the OSA – like many of its equivalents in other countries – faces criticisms of having a “catch-all” nature, the problem of having a definition so broad, almost anything can be construed as a secret. Also, there are debates as to how such acts figure in the face of a “justifiable” disclosure, such as whistle blowing. To mark someone with an offence for disclosing such information would seem contradictory to the aim of such an act, which is to best protect the public interest. More pertinent to the press would be the issue of how prosecutions might be used to discourage investigative reporting.

Perhaps, this also highlights the ambiguity that journalists might have to deal with regarding the law – Daniel said that he did not think the figure an official secret as it was from the private sector, and hence in the public domain. Notably, then editor-in-chief of SPH’s English and Malay newspapers Cheong Yip Seng said about the case: “Most journalists may have seen some ambiguity in the law before the case. There is a lot less ambiguity now.”