“Loose lips sink ships” and “Keep mum – she’s not so dumb” – the spirit of second world war propaganda posters still animates the British response to terrorist atrocities. Lurking in the background is the idea that leakers are unpatriotic by their nature, and that telling the public concrete and inconvenient facts is almost treasonous. This is the obvious explanation for the shock and outrage in the security establishment, and among politicians, at the publication of some of the details of the Manchester atrocity by the New York Times, which had them from sources in the American security community. Theresa May, Andy Burnham and Nicola Sturgeon have all claimed that the publication was undermining the pursuit of the criminals responsible. The American disclosures have been described as “unacceptable”, a word which has come to mean its opposite: that this is something we are going to have to accept but only under noisy protest. The British police have stopped sharing their information on the Manchester bombing with their American counterparts. The damage to trust is real. It will not be undone by President Trump announcing that he wants the leakers caught and punished. In fact the president’s own recklessness with secrets may underlie some of the present disquiet among security professionals.
There are reasonable grounds for anger at the first leak, to an American news network, of the bomber’s name. That is information which the police have very good reasons to keep quiet for a while, since it enables them to discover the friends and family of the criminal before the ones who might have something to hide can get round to hiding it. It also makes sense for any arrests and raids to be carried out without the presence of a journalistic scrum. Operational secrecy is sometimes necessary, and no responsible media organisation will hinder it. But the judgment of what constitutes operational secrecy will always be contested. British newspapers have in the past published stories about the CIA which the American media would not.
It is hard to see how the detailed information leaked to the New York Times hinders any investigation. Will Islamic State be strengthened by knowing the brand of rucksack that the bomber used? Such arguments are not entirely unfamiliar. The US media had published stories based on leaked British police investigations after the 7/7 London bombings in 2005. There will always be questions of taste and judgment in the choice of material to publish. There is a line beyond which crime photographs turn into a kind of pornography of violence and increase the misery of grieving relatives and loved ones, but the pictures so far published do not approach that line.
It is important to distinguish between intelligence material, as handled by intelligence agencies and shared, in theory only with carefully vetted groups, and the routine police databases to which tens of thousands of people have access, quite properly. They are much harder to shut down, and can sometimes be horribly abused. But nothing in the New York Times which has so far been published reveals secret intelligence sources or even hints at their existence.
This row was not confected. However, there are real questions to be answered about what was known about the bomber Salman Abedi and when and by whom. What did the security services miss? What role was played by police cuts under Mrs May when she was home secretary? These are questions calling for calm deliberation, not angry demands for new powers to monitor the internet. This newspaper is on the side of greater openness. The police and security services work for us, the citizens. They can’t report to us directly but we must be free to report on them.
