You don’t know what you don’t know.
A recent judgment in the Information Tribunal is a good example of this platitude in the context of access to information held by public authorities.
The applicant had asked MI5, under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR) for information on its CO2 emissions (by reference to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol). MI5 refuse to disclose in reliance on the exception to disclosure at regulation 12(5)(a), on the grounds that disclosure would adversely affect national security. This refusal was upheld by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the applicant was sceptical. The judgment notes that
she said that MI5 had not demonstrated a causal link between the disclosure of the information and the claimed adverse effect of that disclosure; MI5 had not provided any evidence that the adverse effect of disclosure was more likely than not to occur. She described the position of MI5 to be based on assumptions and that they had overlooked the difficulty of inferring accurate information from emissions data
The Information Tribunal can, though, consider closed material in EIR and FOI processing (ie information and evidence which the applicant cannot see/hear). And in this case, MI5 adduced closed evidence, in the form of “damage assessments” which
included submissions as to how the emissions data could be used and the nature of the conclusions that could be drawn from those data, whether analysing the data alone, by also using data in the public domain or by using comparators” and “identified stark and very accurate conclusions that could be drawn from the raw data itself with simple calculations
In the face of such evidence, the Tribunal inevitably dismissed the applicant’s appeal.
The judgment is well worth reading as an illustration of how the closed material procedure works.
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
informationrightsandwrongs 
Hmmm …. back in 2010, MI5 seemed to have a different attitude. It’s not exactly the same, but in response to an EIR request from me, it told me that in 2009 it consumed 32.4 million kWh of electricity, at a cost of £3.6 million. And it recycled 56% of the 1,546 tonnes of waste that it created.