Registration of Secrets

After activation of notorious Designated Secrecy Law earlier this month, the government began to register special secrets. To prevent terrorism or other purposes, the government encloses various kinds of information discretionarily. Leaving broad concern on going back to pre-war authoritarianism, in which the government oppressed citizens ideologically unfavorable, the government is getting a huge black box.

Designated Secrecy Law was legislated to protect important information for the nation. If a public worker leaked one of the registered secrets, he or she will be punished with ten years in prison at most. In addition, private citizen who required the leak also will be punished with five years in prison at most. Public workers who deal with those secrets will be checked his privacy, including criminal record, history of mental diseases, addictive tendency to alcohol, amount of debt and names or nationality of families and inmates.

The first governmental organization that announced registration of special secret was National Police Agency. On Friday, it registered eleven items related to information gathering satellite, two for terrorism, two for cooperation with foreign government, one for spy activities, one for task and operation of military company, and one for human information source. Information related to satellite was pictures taken by Japanese satellite in past eleven years. One of the two terrorist secrets was domestic and another was international. Expiration of the registration will be five years later.

Although NPA voluntarily released its registration of secrets, others were highly reluctant to reveal that. According to Asahi Shimbun, Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted to the interview that it registered thirty-five special secrets on Friday. By Friday, Cabinet Chamber registered forty-nine items, National Coast Guard did fifteen, Public Security Intelligence Agency did ten, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry did four, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications did two and National Security Council did one. Ministry of Defense registered two hundred and forty-four military secrets to designated secrets.

While ministries were enthusiastic to register their own secrets, most ministries had not started checking process for its workers. Although the law requires establishment of information supervising council in the National Diet, there is still no move to do that in both Houses. Before the law was activated, there had been four hundred seventy-one items registered as special preserving secrets. They counted each pictures as one item. Designated secrecy was registered some related items as one. Numbers of secrets were drastically declined by this counting method. It is even unclear how many items they have registered.