Freedom of Information Act

Speaking as a coward, I can tell you that nothing can be more exhilarating than 15 inches of snow if you can stay indoors in a warm room, high up, that's flooded by light from the reflection of the brilliant white blanket in Central Park. But the stuff, though it was unexpected and unpredicted, was driven by the throbbing monster snow ploughs into sidewalk piles in no time and out at Kennedy Airport the machines were out like an armoured division in the battle of El Alamein, making the most beautiful picture – on television, you understand, I wasn't going out there on assignment – making the most beautiful picture as they whooshed great fountains of snow in curving arcs off the runways. Kennedy, this time, suspended operations for only six hours and, by next morning, everything was back to normal.

If things go on and Britain and France start getting two or three inches every month, we ought to sell you a division of these splendid machines. We wouldn't then hear about Parliament suspended or see little men out with shovels on the M-whatnot. 

Well, as I say, we only had 15 inches. Washington and Baltimore had 25 inches which is some snowfall, believe me! Now anyone roughly acquainted with the geography of the United States will say, 'Wait a minute! Washington and Baltimore? Surely, the man means Boston and Vermont?' Well, that's the normal progression, the west wind blowing across the vast snowfields of the Midwest and heading north-east into a block of warm air over the eastern seaboard and then condensing in a vast dump of snow over the north-east. This was a freak storm coming up from the south – a trick in reverse of warm air hitting the perishing cold air that we've been having with the same effect. 

Washington and points south are about as unprepared, I mean unequipped, for heavy snow as Western Europe. So 25 inches was as bad as they've ever known and the federal government came to a standstill for a day or two. 

Now, why, you may ask, was the storm so unexpected when we have all these new technological tools for prediction, when every night we see on the news those marvellous photographs of the whole 2,000 miles of the east coast and a thousand miles inland, taken from satellites way up in the Star Wars country. Well, you won't believe this, but the Weather Bureau calmly disclaimed all responsibility. 'It was due,' they said, 'to bad computer guidance.' That's what my bank says when you deposit a cheque as a credit and it shows up as a charge against you. Bad computer guidance? I thought in my lumpish way that computers were guided by human beings, by humans actually trained to guide them. 

Well, so they are. I know a girl, the daughter of a contemporary, known her since she was a babbling baby and very cute too. Well, she turned out to be very bright at mathematics and is now a computer programmer. I suppose that like the rest of my generation I look on this as a new profession worthy of great respect, having nothing of course to do with the character of the person who's good at it. She is, I say, is a charming girl, she's sunny, she's forthright and you just have to attribute her talent as a computer programmer to some lucky, mysterious, superiority in one lobe of the brain, like those amiable and otherwise simple people who have one extraordinary gift. 

Like, I remember a visiting Englishman, sent to us years ago as a fine fellow and a jolly guest. We had him down the island for a weekend. He was everything he'd been said to be but brains did not seem to be his specialty. He was charming, mind you, but he was also right out of P. G. Wodehouse. By comparison with him, Bertie Wooster was Einstein. One evening, my neighbour and I, who'd had a bad spell of about two years of chess mania – we used to take the board and the pieces even down to the beach on the most scorching days and brood while swimming on the fate of the queen's knight. 

Well, one evening we thought we'd get a rest from the affable but empty prattle of our guest by getting out the board. 'Do you mind if I watch?' he asked. 'Of course not.' A baby may look at the television news if he'll hold on to his dummy and just gurgle. After about four moves, the irrepressible Englishman said, 'Dear me!' 'Something wrong?' we asked. 'No, no, no, no!!' he said, 'I just thought that looked frightfully risky.' 

He went away, came back for the long delayed mate and he said, 'Would you mind if I had a go?' Ridiculous, of course not! Here, little man. He sat down with my friend and mated him in five moves. Then it was my go. I could certainly do better than that because I'd boned up on one or two of the classical openings which, if they do nothing else in my case, delay the slaughter – the Ruy Lopez, the Sancho Panza, the Luis Tiant openings, and so on. 

About the fourth move, I did something which actually made him say, 'Mm, very interesting.' And then he did something wild which made me chuckle till two moves later he took my queen and from then on I think I survived all of three more moves. 

Well that’s how I looked on our charming programmer girl except that she's sensible and she's not out of P. G. Wodehouse. I'd always assumed that these new technicians were like chartered accountants – honest, careful drones. Well, now comes the shocker. I've been looking over a book with the simple title of 'Privacy' (or Privacy). It has a menacing subtitle, 'How to protect what's left of it'. Now the subtitle, in this country anyway, could be not only a menace but a puzzle because we've been proud in the past few years of the existence of a law the Congress passed five, six, seven years ago, which I don't believe is common to the other democracies. It was called the Freedom of Information Act and it requires the government to open up its files on anybody on request. The files of the FBI, for instance. And you can go to Washington, or write and demand wads of stuff that were once forever secret. Not only on you, yourself, but on anybody you're interested in, to write a book, to check a career, anything. 

Of course, it's opened up a mine of vital information to people who, for instance, were once convicted of crimes and who can now look at the secret stuff that the government or the prosecutor or whoever had against them, whether it was damaging or not. It has also, as you can imagine, opened up a can of worms. At any rate, there is no country, I believe, where it's possible to find out what the government or a private corporation has in its secret files on anybody. You can imagine what this has done to, say, FBI agents. They're going to think twice from now on about putting down as a useful fact any crackpot rumour or malicious rumour that they picked up from a nasty neighbour. 

I found out, for instance, entirely by accident, something transmitted from London to Washington about... about me, oh, 30 years ago. An Englishman was looking lately into the famous Alger Hiss case and he came to Washington and, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, was able to look at confidential materials sent from London in those days to the FBI. He told me of one odd detail. At some point the legal attaché to the American embassy in London – it was in the early Joe McCarthy days – had looked carefully into the ideological bent of my paper, the then Manchester Guardian. The attaché wanted to warn Washington that the Guardian, while he said it was not actually a communist sheet, employed some pretty suspect characters. The only one he could find was a woman who, it turned out, had never been on the paper at all. Nobody knew, in fact, whether she existed. This shrewd attaché did, however, add the secret note that Alistair Cooke was the chief American correspondent (which was correct) and was, I quote, 'a well-known fellow traveller'. This is so hilarious that I can only chuckle over the humourlessness, the sheer dumbness of that embassy legal attaché. Some attaché! 

Well, the new book 'Privacy'. Its thesis is that computers and so-called data (or data) banks used by the government and private industry are on the way to invading most of our privacy. The government uses one out of every 22 computers made and has on an average 18 files for every man, woman and child in the United States. Surely there isn't all that to know about everybody? Of course not! But there are so many computer employees that they have to find things to put in. 

Take the case of a man in Miami, a Mr Eaton who couldn't understand the report that he was being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. Thanks to Freedom of Information, he got the government file. It showed that a man on trial on a drug charge had Mr Eaton's name on a slip of paper in his wallet. Not surprisingly, Mr Eaton is a federal judge and the young man was one of 5,000 defendants who'd appeared before him. 

Then there is the National Crime Information Centre, another hive of computers. On the evidence of its files, many people have been jailed for stealing cars which turned out to be their own cars. And life insurance companies naturally insist on knowing something about your age, health, prospects and so on. But now they tend to swap information with – here goes – medical information bureaus and much of the stuff fed into their computers is not only fact but rumour and hearsay picked up by a human investigator. 

Mr Koch, the present mayor of New York, found, some years ago, he couldn't get a life insurance policy. It came out that long ago some casual neighbour had said he had cancer. Of course he didn't. And then, most of all, there are the credit consumer bureaux which have computers chattering away, compiling facts about you and me from your bank account to the posh or seedy district that you live in, facts about your credit rating. A man in Cleveland went after his file. He was listed as married though he is a bachelor but they showed him the name of his wife. It was his own mother. 

Well, at least the Freedom of Information Act makes it possible now for American citizens to dig and prove how downright stupid and malicious a computer can be. 

I thought I'd tell you all this to cheer you up amid our present load of woes in Iran, Cambodia, Peking, 25 inches of snow and the prospect that the Arabs hold out of tripling the price of oil come the happy spring.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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