Transparency is at the heart of medical science. Every day decisions are made about when to stop and start treatment and how best to invest large sums of money in ways to protect the public from disease. All these rely on knowing as much as possible about the benefits compared to the risks of action or inaction.

No medical treatment is perfect or suitable for everyone — that’s why balancing risks and benefits is crucial. But healthcare is big business; it’s where science meets big money and not all research evidence makes it into the public domain — specifically into medical journals where doctors and academics glean their information.

Medical history is replete with examples of the benefits of a treatment being overhyped and potentially serious side-effects being buried, leading to poor decisions. This wastes public money and can cost lives.

Take the case of the drug lorcainide, used to regulate the heartbeat during a heart attack. In the early 80s, researchers in Nottingham carried out a study of the drug in 95 people using a method known as a randomised control trial. They noticed that nine out of the 48 people taking the drug died, compared to only one out of 47 who got a sugar pill, or placebo, instead.

At the time, the researchers thought that the high number of deaths in those given lorcainide might have been due to chance rather than the drug itself. For commercial reasons, the drug was not developed any further and the results of the trial were never published. However other, similar, heart drugs did make it onto the market and were widely used. But they too had serious safety problems and many were withdrawn.

According to Sir Iain Chalmers, a long-standing champion of transparency in medical research, the lorcainide trial might have been an early warning of trouble ahead for these other heart drugs. At the peak of their use in the late 80s, these medicines are estimated to have caused between 20,000 and 70,000 premature deaths every year in the US alone.

This is a particularly stark example of what might happen when critical evidence remains unavailable to doctors and researchers. Even when individual drugs do make it onto the market and have overcome the regulatory hurdles, information about their risks and benefits might well be hard to come by.

What the public doesn’t know

In western countries, legislation dictates that companies have to provide regulators with a thorough scientific dossier on all trials conducted on a drug so the data can be scrutinised before the drug is allowed onto the market. They are then required to do follow-up studies looking at any adverse reactions that might not have been picked up in the pre-market research. They must inform the authorities about what they find.

Many companies, however, have been reprimanded — mainly in the US courts — for hiding troubling side-effects of drugs, including: anti-depressants, such as Seroxat (known as Paxil in the US; generic name paroxetine) and painkillers, such as Vioxx (rofecoxib).

But it’s not always the companies which are unforthcoming about safety concerns; the regulators have dragged their feet too. Last year, the diabetes drug Avandia (rosiglitazone) was suspended from the market in Europe and severely restricted in the US because of an increased risk of heart problems. But this was long after both the manufacturer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and the US regulator had reason to suspect an increase in serious side-effects.

Rather than the regulators — whose remit is to protect the public — it was the actions of the then New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, in a 2004 court case of GSK’s Seroxat, that led to the side-effects of Avandia coming to public attention. As part of a settlement with the state over its hiding of data on heightened suicide risk in teenagers who took the drug, GSK agreed to post results from its recent clinical studies on a website. And this included studies of the drug Avandia, many of which had been unpublished until then.

Three years later, Dr Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the high-profile Cleveland Clinic in the US, decided to analyse all the studies of Avandia on the website. Using a research method called meta-analysis, he pooled all the results together to see what they said overall. He found that the risk of having heart problems in people with diabetes who took the drug rose by 43 per cent compared to those who had diabetes and did not take it.

The following years entailed investigations into GSK’s conduct by the US Senate; intense deliberations by national drug regulators; questions about how we regulate medicine; and now pending class actions. But what really broke the case open was enforced transparency.
‘It’s important to realise what an important role publicly available trial results data played in the rosiglitazone story’, said Jerry Avorn, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

During an investigation in collaboration with BBC’s Panorama in September 2010, the British Medical Journal looked into the different drug regulators’ attitudes towards transparency. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee discussions are held in public in front of the national press. Most of the relevant scientific documents are made available on a website in advance. Before the deliberations start, each panellist is required to declare any conflicts of interest in line with US legislation to increase transparency.

The UK: a need for transparency

But gaining an overall perspective of discussions within the European and UK regulators was far trickier. The BMJ attempted to speak to people who had sat on panels for them both, but they were bound by confidentiality clauses. Nor would Europe’s regulator release the names of the members of the scientific advisory group discussing the drug under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Doctors and the public in the UK had not been told that the national regulator had voted unanimously to take Avandia off the market several months before the European agency came to the same decision. If the European vote had gone the other way, who knows if the views of the UK’s panel would ever have been revealed.

Some say that open discussions and more transparency do not necessarily lead to better decisions. But documents obtained from the European regulators under the FOIA showed that advisers had concerns about Avandia’s side-effects from the outset. And knowing about these could have lent support to other academics who were ‘intimidated’ by the company, according to a 2007 report by the US Senate Finance Committee.

Manipulation of data

In 1999, when the drug was first licensed, Dr John Buse, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina who specialises in diabetes, told attendees of academic meetings that he was concerned that while Avandia lowered blood sugar, it also caused an increased risk of heart problems.

Concerned about the effects that his comments would have on their drug that had been touted for blockbuster status, executives at GSK (then SmithKline Beecham) devised “what appears to be an orchestrated plan to stifle his opinion”, the Senate Finance Committee report stated — in the light of internal company documents it had seen.

The report goes on to state that GSK executives labelled Buse a “renegade” and silenced his concerns about Avandia by complaining to his superiors and threatening a lawsuit. GSK prepared and required Buse to sign a letter claiming that he was no longer worried about cardiovascular risks associated with Avandia. Then, after he signed the letter, GSK officials began referring to it as Buse’s “retraction letter” to curry favour with a financial consulting company that was evaluating GSK’s products for investors. GSK has denied all allegations in the report, describing them as “absolutely false”.

Years later, Buse wrote a private email to a colleague detailing the incident with GSK: “I was certainly intimidated by them. … It makes me embarrassed to have caved in several years ago.”

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, EU drug agencies were drawing similar conclusions that the drug increased the risk of heart problems during their premarket discussions. In March 2000, Buse sent a letter to the FDA, saying Avandia might raise patients’ risk of heart attacks, and he criticised the company’s marketing, saying it employed “blatant selective manipulation of data” to overstate the drug’s benefits and understate its risks. Doctors may not have prescribed the drug if they had known from the outset there were issues around its safety.

Tamiflu and hidden data

But data transparency doesn’t just mean exposing harm done, it can also help to establish how well something works —- and that reported benefits aren’t just hype. Major international decisions are made on how best to tackle impending health crises based on how well a medical invention works as reported in journals, for example the UK government’s decision to stockpile the influenza drug Tamiflu.

Back in 2009, during the swine flu pandemic, the internationally respected Cochrane Collaboration, a network of independent academics, was commissioned by the NHS to look at the evidence about the benefits and risks of using Tamiflu — a drug the UK had spent around £500m on to treat all those infected in the outbreak.

The academics, led by Christopher Del Mar at Bond University in Australia, scoured the medical literature to find all the different relevant studies of the drug to pool together all the results to see what they said. They were also aware that there had been reports of suicides in Japan — the biggest consumers of Tamiflu — and they wanted to find out more.

But when they went about surveying the medical literature, not all of the trials they knew existed about the effects of the drug in healthy people appeared in the medical press. To fairly reflect the evidence, they needed to know exactly what all trials said. But they couldn’t access all the data they needed — the majority of trials were unpublished. This included the biggest, and therefore arguably the most important, trial conducted.

The UK government at the time had based its decision to stockpile Tamiflu in such large quantities on one particular piece of research published in 2003. This paper showed the dramatic benefits of giving Tamiflu to healthy people who got the flu and not just those who were at particular risk of getting sick. It claimed that the drug reduced the number of people taken to hospital with the flu by a half and reduced serious complications by around the same amount. Little wonder that health officials, concerned about the strain on the NHS, stockpiled the red and yellow pills in such vast quantities.

But this piece of research was funded by the drug’s manufacturer, Roche. It relied upon eight unpublished studies, each given code names, and used the company’s own statisticians to draw conclusions about the data. The two independent researchers named on the paper — who are supposed to be accountable for the content of the research — could not produce the unpublished studies when the Cochrane Collaboration asked them.

Medical research relies heavily on the ability to replicate the findings of another piece of research. This helps to show that a finding wasn’t fraudulent or simply due to chance.

But the Cochrane Collaboration couldn’t replicate the 2003 findings. Its calculations based on the publicly available papers were at odds with the claims made and it needed to see the unpublished studies, so it turned to the company.

Despite asking Roche repeatedly for the full complement of research documents showing that Tamiflu would stop so many healthy people from going into hospital, the whole set were never forthcoming. What it did provide was limited in detail and not what the Cochrane Collaboration needed. Roche did nothing illegal — it is its commercial information. But its commercial information has huge repercussions for public health spend — both in terms of direct costs of the drug and its distribution, but also on what economists call the opportunity costs. Half a billion spent on Tamiflu is half a billion not spent on some other wonder drug.

Del Mar and his team were left to wonder if these bold claims really did stack up — and if the unpublished trials really were the best of the lot, why were they unpublished?

What should have been a straightforward exercise to confirm the evidence base for current policy and practice became instead a complex investigation involving the Cochrane Collaboration, the BMJ and Channel 4 News. Not only did this unmask the extent of unpublished data, it found that the person who actually wrote some of the journal papers was never credited — known in the trade as ghostwriting.

This is not the benign undertaking it is in celebrity autobiographies. Commercial medical writing firms team up with drug companies to draft a series of academic papers aimed at medical journals to promote a carefully crafted message. In the case of Tamiflu, it was that the drug helps to reduce serious complications.

The lead investigator author who was named on the biggest trial – which was unpublished — said that he couldn’t remember ever having participated in the trial when the BMJ/Channel 4 News asked him. And the investigation revealed that documents submitted to Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) show different investigator names appended to the key Tamiflu trials at different points — nowhere is it totally clear who took overall responsibility for all of the studies.

Behind closed doors

In a later twist, an investigation the BMJ conducted with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that experts who had been paid to promote Tamiflu were also authors of influential World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance on the treatment and prevention of pandemic flu. Nowhere were their conflicts of interest made public, despite the WHO having a specific policy to exclude those with such major competing interests from crafting guidelines. And when the scientific evidence pointed to a serious global outbreak of swine flu in early 2009, the WHO pulled together an international expert panel called the Emergency Committee. Keeping up the trend of opacity that had been a recurrent feature of pandemic planning, the committee executed its decisions — which the former health secretary, Alan Johnson, said would lead to “costly and risky” repercussions — behind closed doors in Geneva. An internal WHO investigation conducted by Harvey Fineberg, president of the US Institute of Medicine, criticised the lack of transparency and timely disclosure of conflicts of interest in May last year.

After an inauspicious start — with experts from within the US regulatory agency saying the benefits of healthy people taking the drug were marginal at the outset — Tamiflu sales sky-rocketed. This, coupled with a mild strain of flu and an abject lack of transparency, allowed conspiracy theories to ferment that alleged the WHO was in league with big pharma and had fostered fears of a pandemic in order to boost sales of drugs. And with blogosphere rumours abounding, not only has the WHO’s reputation taken a hit, scepticism might well accompany future warnings of serious flu outbreaks.

“Open access should be the default setting”

Yet again the role of the regulators comes into the spotlight. Roche said that it had supplied all the required data to US and EU regulatory authorities. Only after five months of chasing drug regulators with FOI requests, asking for the full study reports of trials that Roche submitted for its market approval, did the Cochrane Collaboration get some of what it asked for.

“Open access should be the default setting for drug trials once the drug is registered. The public pay for the drug, the public should have access to the facts, not sanitised versions of them”, one of the Cochrane collaborators, Dr Tom Jefferson, said. He believes that drug regulators should make data accessible once a drug comes onto the market. Others suggest that the regulators should also publish the data of drugs that have failed to make it onto the market. That way the situation that happened with locainide would be avoided.

This, too, might be helpful for those charged with making decisions about which drugs health services should use, such as Nice. Writing in the BMJ last year, researchers from the official German drug assessment body charged with synthesising evidence on the antidepressant Edronax (generic: reboxetine) reported they had encountered serious obstacles when they tried to get unpublished clinical trial information from the drug company that held the data.

Once they were able to integrate the astounding 74 per cent of patient data that had previously been unpublished, their conclusion was damning: Edronax (reboxetine) is “overall an ineffective and potentially harmful antidepressant”. This conclusion starkly contradicted the findings of other recent studies that pooled the data published by reputable journals.

But the amounts of data submitted to regulators can be voluminous — another reason why overstretched and underfunded drug authorities could benefit from the safeguard of publicly available data that academics could analyse. The Cochrane Collaboration is now in possession of over 24,000 pages to peruse and distil. But this kind of volume doesn’t deter researchers; they are actively asking for it.

In June this year, Medtronic, a medical technology company, drew widespread criticism in the US for its alleged failure in published research papers to mention the side-effects of a spinal treatment it manufactures. Capitalising on the company’s dip in public opinion, Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine and public health at Yale University, approached Medtronic to take part in a transparency programme for industry that he had set up. He wanted access to all data it had on file — published and unpublished — to commission two independent reviews of it to see what it really said about safety.

“Industry’s reputation has really dropped substantially. People are concerned. They’ve lost confidence and trust in these companies,’”Krumholz said, adding: “Marketing has sometimes gotten the best of the companies and there have been some episodes that have tarnished their reputation. So they are in great need to show to the public that they are really interested in the societal good and want to contribute in ways that are meaningful.”

The company obliged and described its move as “unprecedented in the medical industry”. Needless to say, not all companies are keen on having their data analysed by independent researchers. When Krumholz first approached manufacturers asking them to allow the scientific community to vet their data when safety concerns had emerged, he was rebuffed at every turn. Nevertheless, he hopes this will change and transparency will become expected rather than simply celebrated. He hopes his scheme will make it impossible for other companies — particularly when questions are being raised about the safety of their products — to simply say that they are not going to share all the information they have that may be relevant.

Betraying trust

But there is a broader ethical aspect to selective publication. People often participate in clinical trials because they want to help grow scientific knowledge. And the very nature of many trials means there is a level of uncertainty of what a drug or device may do. This includes any potential benefits and it also involves risks.

According to Chalmers, those who don’t publish all the studies are betraying the trust of those who have volunteered themselves to medical science. “If a patient takes part in a clinical trial — which is essentially an experiment — they are doing their service to humanity and putting themselves at the disposal of science. Unless patients are explicitly told that the results won’t be published if the trial does not show what the researchers or the company want before they start the trial, there is a dereliction of duty on behalf of the researchers.”

Chalmers is uncompromising on what the fate of doctors who are complicit in the burying of bad results should be — they should face discipline that might include the loss of their right to practise medicine or conduct research. His mood reflects a growing concern about the moral duty of medical scientists to publish their results. Journal editors have railed against what they consider a distortion of the medical literature.

But for many years there has been comparative silence from organisations representing people conducting medical research. In the UK, the charge for transparency has been led by the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine in London. Over a decade ago, it said:”Pharmaceutical physicians have a particular ethical responsibility to ensure that the evidence on which doctors should make their prescribing decisions is freely available.”

In June this year, the Royal Statistical Society followed suit and released a statement saying it is “committed to transparency in scientific and social research”. It said it is “crucially important that the results of scientific research should be made publicly available and disseminated as widely as is practical in a timely fashion after completion of the scientific investigation provided that there is no conflict with any legislation on confidentiality of data”.

Chalmers is critical of organisations who represent people conducting medical research — such as the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians — which refuse to sign up to a bill of transparency.

Attempts have been made to limit a researcher’s ability to hide trials that they may not want to come to light. Registers of trials sprang up. In 2005, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors said its journals would only publish trials that were fully registered before they started — which should make trials that went missing much easier to spot. Then, in 2007, the US implemented legislation to ensure that all trials protocols are listed on a public searchable website called clinicaltrials.gov. Companies are supposed to update the information with changes or highlight when and where their research has been published. But the BMJ has found instances where the information on the website is out of date. And, unless someone goes through the database systematically to identify what studies have surfaced publicly, it’s hard to pin down exactly what impact the register has had on publication bias.

But once again, Europe trails behind in terms of transparency. The names of the trials being conducted in the EU appear on the EudraCT database. But crucial details of the study design and where it’s taking place are not on the website.

Europe: an example of how bad it can get

If data transparency is an issue for drugs, the opacity surrounding medical device governance is in a different league. Medical devices cover a wide range of products from adhesive bandages and syringes to heavy duty implantables, such as hip prostheses, pacemakers and stents.

Representatives of the drug industry marvel at how devices get away with a comparative lack of government and public oversight both in the US and the EU. Debates about the perceived flaws in the US system have been hammered out in public — the media weighing in on what they considered to be a failure of their regulators to protect the public adequately. Front page coverage of hip replacements failing and heart devices misfiring has forced discussions about inadequacies in their system into the US Congress.

But this has not happened to the same extent in Europe. One senior US official asked me why the European media has not scrutinised device regulation in the way that the American press had. In the States, Europe has been held up as an example of how bad things can actually get — with patients on this side of the Atlantic having been described as “guinea pigs”.

A joint BMJ/Channel 4 Dispatches in May this year didn’t do much to quell concerns. The EU system of approval by agreement between manufacturer and a commercial regulatory body operates under conditions of almost total commercial secrecy and is overseen in a hands-off manner by national regulatory authorities. Manufacturers submit data to a private body, which then assesses it to see if it is fit for market, and it is then allowed to display a CE mark. It is the same process that non-medical products such as mobile phones and toys go through.

As Nick Freemantle, professor of epidemiology at UCL, said: “The current European regulatory framework — CE marking — might provide sufficient safeguards for electric toasters and kettles, but it is not adequate for treatments that can affect symptoms, health related quality of life, serious morbidity and mortality.”

Representatives of device manufacturers say that the European light touch regulation approach is fine — that there is no evidence it is any worse than America’s. But, as the medical adage goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There is no way of knowing what percentage of serious medical devices are faulty, poorly designed or have had to be recalled, because the European authorities have no centrally maintained register listing the devices on the market. In short, they do not know exactly what patients have had put into them in the first place.

Nor do they know on what evidence market entry was based. No European governmental regulator has it — scientific data sits with the manufacturers and the private companies that “approve” the device. As the head of device regulation in the US, Dr Jeffrey Shuren, said: “For the public in the EU, there is no transparency. The approval [requirements] are just what deal is cut between the device company and the private [organisation].”

Even data about devices that have been pulled from the market is virtually impossible to come by. When the BMJ — together with two doctors from Oxford University — contacted 192 manufacturers of withdrawn medical devices requesting evidence of the clinical data used to approve their devices, they denied us access, claiming that “clinical data is proprietary information”, that it was “company confidential information” and that they could discuss only “publicly available information” — of which there is very little.

Likewise, when we asked the relevant commercial regulatory bodies for the scientific rationale for approval of various devices that had been recalled, the results were stark. This information was classed as confidential because they were working as a client on behalf of the manufacturers — not the people who have them implanted in their bodies.

Even the Freedom of Information Act is of little help in obtaining information on any adverse events. The BMJ/Channel 4 Dispatches attempts to get access to adverse incident reports for specific implantables from the UK national regulator through the act were thwarted because it is overridden by medical device legislation. Article 15 of the EU Medical Devices Directive states: “Member States shall ensure that all the parties involved in the application of this Directive are bound to observe confidentiality with regard to all information obtained in carrying out their tasks.”

Even the Association of British Healthcare Industries, a trade organisation of device manufacturers, agrees that the lack of transparency leads to misunderstanding and mistrust. “Today it is very hard for anyone, even manufacturers and authorities, let alone citizens, to find out what products are approved to be on the market. We would like to see enhanced transparency and information to patients, citizens and all EU government authorities.”

Signs of change

So what does this mean? It means that doctors and patients are left to trust the companies to provide them with information about the benefits and harms of using their products. But with little scrutiny, oversight and transparency, there are no guarantees of this being a fair reflection of what their data — where they have it — actually says.

But there is a movement for change. As Krumholz says: “I think one day people will look back and say now wait a minute. Half of the data were beyond public view and yet people were making decisions every day about these products? How did you let that happen? And I’m not sure how we let it happen.

“But I hope we’ll enter an era where that will be over, and in fact there will be a great sharing of data, that we’ll be able to have a public dialogue that’s truly informed by the totality of evidence, and that we’ll be able to make choices that are based on all of that
evidence, knowing that there are no perfect drugs. That’s always going to be a trade off. But we ought to be informed by all the evidence when we’re making these decisions.”

This article appears in Dark Matter the new edition of Index on Censorship magazine, which explores science and censorship.

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That would be in the public interest, surely? The UK’s previous government thought otherwise, when they passed the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 during the ‘wash-up’. [Image, right: Jimmy Harris, on Flickr]

Amendments outlined in Schedule 7, Section 46 of the Act strengthened the Royal Family and Royal Household’s exemption from the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The Bill got Royal Assent as well, on 8 April 2010.

But full FoI exemption for the Royal Family was sealed by the current government. On 16 January 2011, just a week after the Ministry of Justice trumpeted to extend the scope of FoI for increased transparency of public affairs, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced his commencement order to bring Royal Family exemption into full force:

“The changes provide an absolute instead of a qualified exemption for information relating to communications with the sovereign, heir to the throne or second in line to the throne or those acting on their behalf.

“The exemption for other members of the royal family and members of the royal household remains qualified. The lifespan of the exemption changes from 30 to 20 years or the lifetime of the relevant member of the royal family plus five years, whichever is longer.

“This amendment to the FoI Act is necessary to protect the long-standing conventions surrounding the monarchy and its records, for example the sovereign’s right and duty to counsel, encourage and warn her Government, as well as the heir to the throne’s right to be instructed in the business of Government in preparation for their future role as monarch.”

Whereas there was previously an exemption from the exemption, Freedom of Information enquiries about the Royal Family are no longer subject to a public interest test. There is no way to hold them under account under FoI.

In the Protection of Freedoms Bill, which had its second reading in Parliament on 1 March, this provision is extended to Northern Ireland as well.

Republic, the British organisation campaigning for the end of a constitutional role for the monarchy, raised concerns ahead of the Bill’s assent.

“If passed, this amendment would mean that Charles’s attempts to influence government policy on health, architecture, education, agriculture, the environment, even war and peace, will remain secret – until years after his death. Far from protecting ‘impartiality’, this amendment gives Charles the green light to get even more stuck in.”

The light is now well and truly green since the Act became law. During the Parliamentary debate of the Bill Jack Straw told MPs that there was “no way members of the royal family can change public policy.” Unfortunately, with the Act’s amendment to FOIA we’re not allowed to see that for ourselves.

As Republic said just under a year ago:

“Straw says our constitutional arrangements are threatened by greater transparency. We say this is an argument for a new constitution – not more secrecy.”

Republic this week, supported by Index on Censorship, has written to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, calling on him to use the Protection of Freedoms Bill to reverse this exemption and “to define the royal household for the first time as a public authority within the terms of the Act”.

“This is not simply about the royal household’s use of public funds – it is a serious issue of accountability and transparency that goes to the heart of government.  It is well documented, and admitted by Clarence House, that the Prince of Wales routinely lobbies government ministers on a wide range of controversial and deeply political matters such as the environment, education and health.

“The current lack of scrutiny over such actions means that citizens have no means by which to judge if ministers are taking decisions according to the public interest or to suit the interests and agenda of the heir to the throne.”

Republic, along with cosignatories Heather Brooke, author and Freedom of information Campaigner; Professor Roy Greenslade, Department of Journalism, City University and former editor of the Mirror; Cllr. Mike Harris, Head of Public Affairs, Index on Censorship; Professor Stephen Haseler, Director, Reform Foundation; and Professor Adam Tomkins, John Millar Professor of Public Law, is inviting Clegg to discuss these issues and add to the Protection of Freedoms Bill “amendments that would bring the royal household and the monarchy fully within the scope of the Act”.

“To choose to continue the regime of secrecy surrounding the monarchy would not only represent a profound missed opportunity, it would also call into question your personal and political commitment to accountability.”

And if Clegg doesn’t budge? “Then [his] commitment to transparency will be undermined and we’ll have to take our own steps,” says Republic campaigner James Gray, who describes the Royal Family FoI exemption as a “glaring anomaly”.

More information at Republic. A protest outside Buckingham Palace is due to take place on Thursday 3 March. The letter to Clegg is displayed below:

Letter to Clegg challenging Royal Family exemption from FoI

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This article was first published in Media Guardian

The information genie cannot be put back into the bottle, however hard authorities try. But the authorities continue to exploit the internet as a means of control

WikiLeaks “changes everything”. So says Christian Caryl in the latest New York Review of Books, as the media, technology and foreign policy worlds ponder the effect of the industrial dumping of US government cables. For several years American analysts in particular have been trying to make sense of the information free-for-all facilitated by the internet. Julian Assange‘s perhaps inadvertent contribution is to have brought a previously arcane debate into the forefront of global politics.

So what exactly has the WikiLeaks affair changed? It is just over a month since the third and by far the largest tranche of State Department documents was sprayed into the public domain by a curious mix of techno-anarchist geeks and some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers, including this one. The tensions between WikiLeaks and the Guardian were set out in painful detail in a Vanity Fair article that juxtaposed the values of traditional journalists with those of Assange and his crew.

Assange’s personality has been much trawled over and is, in the long term for journalism and democracy, irrelevant. What matters is what he has done, and what his pursuers are doing, to the related issues of freedom of expression, freedom of information, confidentiality and accountability.

WikiLeaks was, as Ron Deibert pointed out in the New York Times, only a symptom of a much larger trend. Somebody, somewhere, sometime would have done what Assange did. If governments and corporations can hold data about citizens’ intimate details, their friends, their shopping predilections and their innermost thoughts, then it was surely inevitable that the tables would eventually be turned.

The most ridiculous mistake by the US authorities was to imagine that so-called confidential documents – incriminating sources, in some cases – could be kept out of the public domain when circulated to 2.5 million people working in government service. Their British counterparts learnt this long ago when the embarrassing emails of Tony Blair’s team were published during the Hutton inquiry. I have long wondered at the artlessness of some in public life who fail to see that every email, SMS or tweet they write is a publishable document.

The Americans and other governments will not, should not, repeat their errors. Distribution lists will be tightened; monitoring of those with access to truly secret information will be improved. However, as Deibert suggests, the “venomous furore” against WikiLeaks must rank as “one of the biggest temper tantrums” of recent years.

It is more than that. It is deeply dangerous. The hysterical response of many to the WikiLeaks controversy, particularly in the US (the UK government has shown commendable restraint), has played into the hands of the Kremlin, the Chinese Communist party, Robert Mugabe, Burma’s generals and other assorted dictators around the world. Every time now a dissident, activist or blogger is arrested, regimes such as these can wave two fingers at international concern. “You did it, so why can’t we?” will come the response. They are already doing so. The democracy recession, which has been gathering pace in recent years, has been boosted by Hillary Clinton’s laughable claim that the Wiki publications were an “attack on the international community”. This sameHillary Clinton gave a speech a year ago about the possibilities for internet freedom.

So now we have two competing, and ugly, forces locking horns like bulls. On the one side are governments who, as Evgeny Morozov argues in his new book, The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World, are exploiting the internet as a means of control rather than democratisation. They are aided in their endeavours by corporations such as Amazon, Mastercard, Visa and others who do the bidding of the authorities either under pressure or quite voluntarily in order to ingratiate themselves. On the other side is a small sub-section of the web 2.0 community who regard themselves as above the law, for whom all authority is bad and all information is good. As Jaron Lanier puts it in the Atlantic: “The ideology that drives a lot of the online world … is the idea that information in sufficiently large quantity automatically becomes Truth. For extremists, this means that the internet is coming alive as a new, singular, global, post-human, superior life form.”

The bit in the middle – mediated journalism, non-governmental organisations and the more thinking end of the internet generation – is being squeezed. Instead of pugilism on both sides, what is needed is a sober attempt to navigate through a new world in which information is distributed that would have taken conventional investigative journalists years to dig out.

This work is taking place, albeit in an adverse environment. A group called the Global Network Initiative includes some of the big players in the web world such as Google, along with NGOs and other organisations. The aim is to find a path through these problems, but always with an accent on free expression. Clay Shirky, one of the sharpest observers of the scene, talks of a “corrective towards transparency”, before adding: “I don’t, however, believe in total transparency and, even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.”

Once the dust has settled, a new and healthier order might emerge, possibly, as Deibert suggests, a “depersonalised and professionalised” son of WikiLeaks acting as a clearing house for investigative journalism. The role of mainstream journalism will shift over time from reporting to sifting, redaction and analysis, helping readers digest the information overload. The problem, Lanier suggests, is that “information in oceanic magnitude can confuse and confound as easily as it can clarify and empower, even when the information is correct”.

The media watcher John Lloyd noted recently that the WikiLeaks affair “reduces investigative journalists to bit players whose job is to redact the output and provide context”. This predates the current saga. For years the Fourth Estate has under-invested in and devalued its responsibility – to use that pious phrase – to speak truth to power. I can never put out of my mind the remark of an old colleague, a one-time lobby journalist at Westminster, who told me after his first week running communications at a government department that he was staggered by how little journalists actually found out. Much of the content of the British media has been reduced to toxic comment or stenography for the powerful in politics, business, sport and elsewhere.

Lloyd has long argued the power of the media is increasing inexorably as politicians cower. In some respects he is right. Self regulation remains poor; standards are often all too low. In the short term it seems that journalists have many of the cards. Whenever something goes wrong, politicians have to deal with it not within a day (as was the imperative when 24-hour TV news began) but now, thanks to Twitter, within minutes.

Thus when Eric Illsley pleaded guilty to expenses fraud, Ed Miliband rushed out of his office to declare that he must stand down immediately as an MP. When Vince Cable was caught “declaring war” on Rupert Murdoch, David Cameron and Nick Clegg had to decide his fate forthwith.

Yet this seeming power shift is transient. Attention spans are brief. Engagement on social networking sites is frantic but shallow, a phenomenon Morozov terms the age of the “slacktivist”. Scream! Sign a petition! Tell your friends you’ve done so. Then move on to the next thing.

Sometimes media activity does have lasting impact. The MPs’ expenses scandal was a mixture of the modern (the handed-over disc) and the old-fashioned (the trawling through of priceless information that was tough to decipher). Not many individuals have been punished, but the reputation of the elected legislature (rightly or wrongly) has been seriously damaged. In this instance, the information was simple to absorb and, thanks to the duck houses, colourful and communicable. It focused on locally or nationally recognisable individuals.

WikiL eaks has not produced any such scalps. Some ambassadors have been embarrassed, others have had to be rotated, but American diplomacy has emerged unscathed. Indeed, one could argue it has emerged enhanced. For sure, some hypocrisy has been exposed, but the caricature of a frothing, gun-toting, CIA-dominated State Department has not quite materialised.

Our expectations towards information have changed, for good. They had probably done so before WikiLeaks, but now, no matter how hard governments try, the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. The notion of a 30-year rule in which patrician officials deign to allow us, long after the protagonists have left the scene, knowledge of what was done in our name, is surely over. Policy making has been demystified.

The information relationship has shifted, but the power relationship has surely not. We have more knowledge, but are we able to, do we have time to, indeed do we really want to act on it? Will our security services now act any differently? Are our banks acting any differently? Once they have sorted out their online filtering system, will our diplomats and governments act any differently? Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

John Kampfner is the chief executive of Index on Censorship and author of Freedom For Sale

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Before he is freed Assange must pay a £200,000 security into the court, he will be electronically tagged and subject to a curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am.

Justice for Assange campaign protester outside the court hearing. Photograph: Nadia CosentinoIn court his barrister Geoffrey Robertson offered £240,000 in financial sureties from high-profile figures and the surrender of Assange's passport.

Last week a London court refused to grant bail to Assange, in spite of pledges of financial surety from high-profile figures including socialite Jemima Khan, journalist John Pilger and film-maker Ken Loach.  District Judge Howard Riddle said he felt there was a substantial risk that Assange would flee the country.

Assange’s bail will be reviewed on 11 January, the extradition proceedings will be heard in February.

Assange will not be freed before the appeal is heard and the cash security is paid into the court, he will continue to be held at Wandsworth prison.

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As has been well documented, Google captured personal information relating to thousands of people transmitted over Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars. As a result, they should have been fined at the highest possible level by the ICO (and, indeed, it’s a great shame that the criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police has drawn to an inconclusive close).

Instead, the ICO dragged its feet, entirely unwilling to do anything about the issue, reluctantly (after much prodding) sending a couple of non-technical personnel around to Google HQ to look at whatever Google wanted to show them, then promptly letting Google off the hook to the amazement of just about everyone, and finally — prompted only by more effective action by commissioners overseas, which showed that Google was wrong to maintain that they hadn’t captured meaningful data — the ICO has now announced that Google had indeed breached the law, but they weren’t going to do anything about it.

The commissioner’s failure to take action is absolutely disgraceful. There simply cannot be any justification for their approach over the past months, but at this point the easiest thing for the ICO would also be the right thing —  punishing the company that must quietly have been expecting punishment since this story broke. Instead, the ICO stick to their guns, way beyond anything justified by the natural stubbornness anyone feels when a position one’s adopted is challenged.

They were plain wrong on this and they should have been mature enough to admit it, instead of prolonging their embarrassing refusal to take any action for month after month and then producing this absurd “decision”. After all, this isn’t a game, in which they “hold fast” against campaigners like Big Brother Watch. They have a job to do, and the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people — of victims, quite frankly — was at stake. They should have smacked Google as hard as they could.

Instead, ruling that Google has broken the law, but then taking no action against it, shows the commissioner to be a paper tiger. The commissioner is effectively an apologist for the worst offender in his sphere of responsibility, not a policeman of it. Whatever the cause, their decision means open season on your personal data. There will never be a larger invasion of privacy by the private sector in this country than Google’s (to be this intrusive, you normally need government help); if what Google did was OK, then anything goes.

Think for a moment about the ramifications for freedom of expression if you can’t contact someone without the fear of your data being snatched from the airwaves and used as the snatcher wishes.

If Google, the largest beast in the field, can harvest the personal information of thousands of people and get off scot-free, then the ICO plainly has a contempt for privacy and for their duty to protect it. The ICO is good at enforcing freedom of information law and seem to see that as their raison d’etre. Why not leave them with that and give the privacy role to a new office, which might actually care about it?

Alex Deane is the Director of Big Brother Watch

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“Drop it”, ministers strongly advised, as I sensed the government was not coming clean about their role in “extraordinary rendition”, the US practice of secretly transferring terror suspects to places where they were likely to be tortured.  It was the familiar attempt to smother an embarrassing tale, a practice at which New Labour and its spin doctors were particularly adept. The first indications from the Con-Lib coalition are that it intends to unearth its predecessor’s activities. William Hague, the foreign secretary, has delivered what he promised before the general election — a judge-led inquiry into allegations of complicity in torture.

What was astonishing was the lengths to which ministers and officials went to cover up their activities. As they persisted in a shameless pursuit of secrecy, they blamed journalists and conspiracy theorists, fed, they claimed, by human rights groups and misguided lawyers, for not letting go.

The determination of the Blair and Brown administrations, which in their very early days promised a new era of openness, to suppress information was more than an instinctive bureaucratic reaction by those simply enjoying power and wanting as quiet a life as possible. Ministers, and Blair in particular, adopted an extraordinarily cavalier attitude to the rule of law, and to constitutional and democratic principles.

The government was quick to use the Official Secrets Act for political reasons. In 2007, David Keogh, a Cabinet Office official, and Leo O’Connor, former researcher to a Labour MP, were convicted after an Old Bailey trial, partly heard behind closed doors, in a move that stopped the public finding out whether George Bush proposed to Blair at a meeting about Iraq in Washington in April 2004 what would have been a war crime and how Blair reacted.

The evidence the government suppressed was an official record of the Washington meeting when the situation in Iraq was deteriorating fast. The leaked memo is reported to have referred to Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the Arabic TV channel al Jazeera and, ironically, to have revealed how far Blair went in criticising US military tactics when its forces were assaulting the Iraqi town of Falluja.

Before the trial, Margaret Beckett, then foreign secretary, made it clear embarrassment was the real issue at stake. She signed a Public Interest Immunity (PII) certificate claiming the disclosure of the document would have a “serious negative impact” on UK-US diplomatic relations. “The ultimate consequence”, she claimed, “would be a substantial risk of harm to national security.” Such a claim, implying that good relations with Washington were more important than upholding the rule of law or standards of morality, was echoed precisely by David Miliband, Beckett’s successor, in the Binyam Mohamed case.

Strikingly, and to the government’s chagrin, it was not Parliament but the courts, and the country’s most senior judges, who have proved the most effective enemies of secrecy. For 18 months, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, egged on by MI5 and MI6, dismissed increasingly angry warnings by the high court about the implications, notably for the rule of law, about the government’s determined attempt to suppress evidence of British complicity in the torture of terror suspects.

Bit by bit, more and more evidence emerged of MI5’s involvement in the unlawful treatment of Binyam Mohamed. A British resident of Ethiopian descent, he was arrested in Karachi in 2002 with a false passport. Held incognito, he was interrogated by an MI5 officer, known only as Witness B. He was subsequently secretly rendered to Morocco, where he was brutally tortured, then rendered to the notorious “black” prison at Bagram in Afghanistan before being flown to Guantanamo Bay. MI5 officers willingly provided information and photographs to the CIA about what they knew of Mohamed’s past even though the US authorities refused to tell MI5 where the prisoner was being held.

In six separate damning judgments, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones observed that the relationship of the UK to the US in connection with Mohamed “was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing”. The government and its lawyers relied on the tired old argument, to which English courts have traditionally deferred, whereby claims by ministers that secrecy is needed on the grounds of national security cannot be challenged.

The long-held assumption has been that when the executive flies the flag of “national security”, the courts, Parliament, the media, must immediately genuflect. In the Binyam Mohamed case, it was the courts – and not Parliament – which broke that taboo. “The suppression of reports of wrong- doing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law”, Thomas and Lloyd Jones insisted. “Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy.”

In particular, in a judgment last October, they ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of a CIA report showing what MI5 knew of Mohamed’s “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment“. They dismissed Miliband’s claims that disclosing CIA evidence of unlawful treatment would harm national security and threaten the UK’s vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.

“Of itself”, said the judges, “the treatment to which Mr Mohamed was subjected could never properly be described in a democracy as ‘a secret’ or an ‘intelligence secret’ or ‘a summary of classified intelligence’.” What the seven paragraphs revealed was “admissions of what officials of the US did to BM [Mohamed] during his detention in Pakistan”.

They added: “It was impossible to believe that President Obama would take action against the United Kingdom” if the summary of CIA material was disclosed. Publication was “necessary to uphold the rule of law and democratic accountability”, the judges continued. “In our view”, they said, “as a court in the United Kingdom, a vital public interest requires, for reasons of accountability and the rule of law in the United Kingdom, that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain in the United Kingdom.”

Would Obama really “curtail the supply of information to the United States’ oldest ally when what was put into the public domain was not intelligence?”, they asked rhetorically. There was no “rational basis”, they said, for claims made by Miliband and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, that disclosure would affect the supply of US intelligence to the UK and put British lives at risk. Miliband’s case was irrational because it was “logically incoherent”.

Moreover, it transpired that the British government and their lawyers were trying to suppress information that had already been released by the Obama administration, notably his decision to publish CIA memos on interrogation techniques. One document Miliband eventually agreed could be disclosed referred to a memo from Jay Bybee, former US assistant attorney general, to John Rizzo, acting CIA general counsel, which, the judges said, “made clear that the techniques described were those employed against Mr Zubaydah, alleged to be a high-ranking member of al Qaida”. Another document which the British government insisted had to remain secret consisted of a “verbatim quote” from a memo made public in the US seven months previously.

When, to the government’s dismay, the appeal court, consisting of three of the country’s top judges, also dismissed Miliband’s argument in a devastating ruling in February, it did so partly because of what had been revealed already in the US courts – namely, evidence about Mohamed’s torture an American judge accepted as true. If any doubts remained, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, and the President of the Queen’s Bench division of the high court, Sir Anthony May, made it clear that what Miliband wanted to suppress was not only involvement in unlawful activities but attempts to lie about it.

A passage written by Neuberger (and toned down at the request of Miliband’s counsel, Jonathan Sumption QC) refers to MI5’s denial that it “knew of any ill-treatment of detainees interviewed by them whilst detained by or on behalf of the [US] Government”. Neuberger continued: “Yet, in this case, that does not seem to have been true: as the evidence showed, some Security Services officials appear to have a dubious record relating to actual involvement, and frankness about any such involvement, with the mistreatment of Mr Mohamed when he was held at the behest of US officials.”

Some security officials “appear to have dubious records when it comes to human rights and coercive techniques”, Neuberger added. There was reason to “distrust” the advice and information of the security services when it came to Mohamed’s mistreatment. This in turn, Neuberger added, raised the whole question of whether statements in public interest immunity (PII) certificates – gagging requests to the court – signed by ministers on the basis of advice from the security and intelligence agencies could be relied on as being accurate. “The Security Services have an interest in the suppression of such information”, noted the appeal court referring to knowledge of torture and inhuman treatment.

In a key passage, the judges stated: “In principle, a real risk of serious damage to national security, of whatever degree, should not automatically trump a public interest in open justice when it concerned UK knowledge of unlawful interrogation techniques used by US officials”. They also rejected Miliband’s claim that the “control principle” applied, whereby only the provider of intelligence could release it, not the receiver of it, whatever the circumstances. The principle could not be applied, they said, if it concealed that “those for whom the executive in this country is ultimately responsible were involved in or facilitated wrongdoing in the context of the abhorrent practice of torture”.

While the government and its security and intelligence agencies were publicly insisting that it abhorred torture and the abuse of prisoners, privately they were complicit in it. The Mohamed case showed that this was not on the grounds that in the fight against international terrorism they had to cooperate with countries and agencies which did not share the same “standards” as Britain – an explanation they now deploy. No, Miliband defended his actions and those of his officials not out of any conviction, however misguided, or even for pragmatic reasons, but ultimately because he did not want to upset the US government. This was the case even though Washington had severely embarrassed the British government, to put it no higher than this, by not informing it of the use of Diego Garcia, the US air base on the British Indian Ocean Territory, for secret CIA rendition flights, or the whereabouts and torture of terror suspects, including Binyam Mohamed and – as Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5 recently complained – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. Questions remain about what ministers, including Tony Blair, privately knew of the activities of American security and intelligence officers, who in the Bush administration sanctioned them, and what his own attitude was.

That the government secretly tried to suppress what it knew about CIA “torture flights” was made clear as early as 2005 with the leak of a note from Irfan Siddiq, a member of then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s private office, to Grace Cassy in Tony Blair’s office, drawn up in response to a Downing Street request for advice “on substance and handling” of the controversy over CIA rendition flights and allegations of Britain’s connivance in them. “We should try to avoid getting drawn on detail”, Siddiq warned, “and try to move the debate on, in as front foot a way as we can, underlining all the time the strong anti-terrorist rationale for close cooperation with the US, within our legal obligations.”

After referring to a statement by Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, that, “where appropriate”, the US would seek assurances before transporting suspects to countries where they risked being tortured, the Foreign Office noted: “We would not want to cast doubt on the principle of such government-to-government assurances, not least given our own attempts to secure these from countries to which we wish to deport their nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism: Algeria etc.” In April, Amnesty International singled out the UK among European countries striking “no torture” deals with foreign countries as a means to deport people it labels a threat to national security.

Less than two years after he came to power in 1997, Blair repeatedly intervened in an attempt to deport asylum seekers to Egypt, despite being told that they might be tortured and sentenced to death. Court documents showed how he tried to get Egypt to give assurances that the men would cooperate with countries and agencies which did not share the same “standards” as Britain – an explanation they now deploy.

Warned that there was “ample evidence from a range of sources of serious human rights abuses in Egypt” and that there was “little scope for pushing deportations any further”, he replied: “This is crazy. Why can’t we press on?” Told that no assurances were forthcoming, Blair wrote: “This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?” All this may help to make The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski and based on Robert Harris’s political thriller about the memoirs of a prime minister threatened with war crime charges, particularly piquant.

Guidance given to MI5, MI6 and military intelligence officers interrogating detainees abroad remains secret at the time this article was going to press. In March last year, Gordon Brown responded to growing evidence of British collusion in the torture and abuse of detainees abroad by promising to give the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (the ISC) new guidelines on interrogation. Eight months later, the ISC were given them – in a form, noted officials, “in which they could be published”.

A year later, the ISC sent Downing Street its criticisms of the guidelines. The prime minister’s office, which vets ISC reports and decides how and when they can be published, suppressed them until after the general election. Stung by criticism of its ineffectiveness by both the courts and the media, MPs on the committee directed their fire at their critics rather than the security and intelligence agencies they are supposed to hold to account.

One of the tools successive governments have relied on to suppress information in court cases is the PII (public interest immunity) certificates. They are signed by ministers and are meant to alert judges to the damage to national security, or threat to individuals or the administration of justice, if sensitive information is released. That is their proper function. As independent lawyers argued in the Binyam Mohamed case, PII is not supposed to be invoked “to prevent disclosure of evidence of serious criminal misconduct by officials of the United Kingdom”. If PII certificates are upheld by the judge, then the information or evidence referred to or contained in them cannot be used by either the prosecution or the defence in a subsequent trial.

Special procedures are now in place governing the proceedings of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) set up to hear challengesto Home Office decisions to deport or exclude someone from Britain. Special Advocates, suitably vetted, are appointed on behalf of the defendants to have sight of information gathered by the intelligence agencies. But they cannot pass this on to lawyers representing the defendants, let alone the defendants themselves.

The Brown government wanted to extend this way of suppressing information for the first time to civil cases. Pressed by MI5 and MI6, ministers argued it should be introduced so that seven British residents incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, or their lawyers, will not have access to what the security and intelligence agencies describe as “secret government information” – a reference to what British officials knew about the prisoners’ ill-treatment. The seven – Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al- Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga – are suing MI5 and MI6, and the home and foreign secretaries, for unlawful acts, negligence and conspiracy. In a further devastating judgment, the appeal court said this attempt to suppress evidence in a civil trial undermined deep- seated principles of common law and open justice. One of those principles, ruled Lord Neuberger, master of the rolls, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Sullivan was that “trials should be conducted in public, and the judgements should be given in public”. The judges ruled: “In our view the principle that a litigant should be able to see and hear all the evidence which is seen and heard by a court determining his case is so fundamental, so embedded in the common law that, in the absence of parliamentary authority, no judge should override it, at any rate in relation to an ordinary civil claim such as a claim for damages for tort or breach of statutory duty.” They added: “Quite apart from the fact that the issue is one of principle, it is a melancholy truth that a procedure or approach which is sanctioned by a court expressly on the basis that is applicable only in exceptional circumstances nonetheless often becomes common practice.”

The determination to suppress information on the grounds of national security has been extended to military operations in Iraq. Senior judges last year accused the Ministry of Defence of “lamentable” conduct over attempts to suppress information on the interrogation of Iraqi detainees held by British troops in Camp Abu Naji, an army base in Amara, north of Basra, after a fierce battle in 2004. The high court described the MoD’s handling of the case, including false claims made in PII certificates, as “truly alarming”. Perhaps we have witnessed the nadir in the pursuit of official secrecy in the name of security. It was a theme pursued with special vigour by Tony Blair after all.

During their post-election negotiations, the Liberal Democrats and David Cameron’s Conservatives cited civil liberties as an area they could agree on. They had both called for an independent judicial inquiry into complicity in the abuse and torture of terror suspects. Now David Cameron has announced a judicial inquiry, though its scope and how much of it will be held in public or behind closed doors remains unclear. Given the mounting evidence, it is difficult to see how the new government could have continued as if nothing happened.

This article appears in Radio Redux, the new issue of Index on Censorship, out now. It has been updated for the web to reflect developments in the time since the magazine went to print.

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