INFORMATION OF RESTRICTED ACCESS IN THE MEDIA

Information Security. Information security is one of the young concepts, the contents of which are intense discussions. It is easier to find a common language for those who are engaged in secrets from the field of technology - it is not by chance that in technical universities of Russia, the training of specialists in information protection issues began. It is more difficult to come to a common view on the humanitarian content of information security. However, scientists are already using a complex of relatively new concepts. For example, information management is distinguished along with traditional economic, administrative, socio-psychological and legal types of management. Military experts talk about the information struggle, which is conducted in conditions of political conflicts and is capable of bringing victory even without weapons. Accordingly, the concepts of informational violence, state informational potential, etc. [8]

A common mistake is to consider information security only at the state level. A social scientist and a publicist, who stand on the positions of humanism, should equally be occupied by large social systems, individual groups and communities, and an individual. All of them have the right to protection from information threats. In particular, the moral well-being of a citizen is often sacrificed to supposedly public interests. In one of the regions, the governor, obsessed with the idea of ​​eradicating drunkenness, ordered to publish in the local press the names of people who regularly appear at work and in public places while intoxicated. Without going into a long analysis of violations of the rights and freedoms of a citizen, we note an important circumstance in this case: the regional administration interprets information security one-sidedly, as an opportunity to put things in order by prescriptive methods.

The concept of information security in regulatory documents is described as the state of protection of the information environment of a society, ensuring its formation, use and development in the interests of citizens, organizations, and the state (RF Law "On participation in international information exchange"). There are two approaches to the implementation of this formula: either a certain supreme authority closes the channels of information at its own discretion in the name of their protection, or, conversely, a reasonable mode of information exchange is established, which is based on the balance of interests of all the above subjects: citizens, organizations and collectives, the state. Worldwide and domestic experience advocates a second method for solving the problem - a more laborious, but realistic and democratic one.

From the point of view of journalism, the articles of the Law “On Mass Media” that address the abuse of freedom of the media are directly related to the topic . According to Article 4, the use of the media is not allowed: for committing criminal offenses; for disclosure of information constituting a state secret or another secret specially protected by law; to call for the seizure of power, violent change of the constitutional system and the integrity of the state; to incite national, class, social, religious intolerance or discord; for the distribution of programs that promote pornography, the cult of violence and cruelty. With a certain degree of conditionality, we assign these prohibitions to the observance of the security of the state and society. Article 51 more explicitly expanded to the interests of the individual. In particular, it prohibits the use of the rights of a journalist to discredit a particular citizen or certain categories of citizens solely on the basis of gender, age, racial or national identity, language, attitude to religion, profession, place of residence and work, as well as in connection with political beliefs.

Secrets and secrets in the media. In editorial practice, it is often necessary to come into contact with such a side of the topic as the availability of various secrets and secrets to correspondents. Recall that from this point of view information is divided into open (shared) and protected (limited use). The professional requires the ability to understand, firstly, what actually refers to the secrets and to which ones; secondly, what is permitted to them in their coverage, and how to overcome the illegitimate obstacles to access; thirdly, which he is responsible for the disclosure of information protected by law. The task is at the same time extremely difficult, and quite practically achievable. The list of secrets and secrets is great, and the situations of addressing them are unpredictably diverse - hence the objective complexity. But there are general rules set forth in the legislation, and they help to choose an unmistakable line of conduct in each individual case.

The list of secrets offered by official documents is indeed cumbersome and even redundant. In addition, not all of them received a detailed interpretation of the law. The guideline for streamlining this list is the Russian Declaration of the Rights and Freedoms of Man and Citizen (1991) - a basic normative act, designed to be the basis for further lawmaking. It mentions personal, family, professional, commercial, state secrets. Here, for example, there is no official secrecy that constantly appears in other documents and with which journalists are systematically confronted. The office secret is called in the Civil Code (Article 139). However, there is no single regulation for attributing this or that information to it. Hence, references to official secrets at the level of an individual enterprise are more often unjustified.

It is completely unlawful “self-activity” in the form of the invention of any new kinds of secrets that are not stipulated by normative documents. Further, the legislation, as a rule, describes in detail the procedure for attributing information to classified information - therefore, the keeper of secrecy is obliged to confirm that he acts in accordance with this procedure. Finally, information of a non-personal nature (state, commercial) can be declared closed only on the basis of a special decision, documented. The journalist has the right to demand that this documentary basis be presented to him.

Of all types of classified information, state secrets are most fully represented in legislation. On her example, we consider the norms of treatment of a journalist with limited access information. According to the Law "On State Secrets", it includes information protected by the state in the field of its military, foreign policy, economic, intelligence, counterintelligence and operational-search activities, the spread of which may damage the security of the Russian Federation. As you can see, the information must have two fundamental characteristics - to reflect certain areas of activity (and no other) and be related to national security. The range of information, therefore, is not at all as wide as it may seem at first glance. The remaining uncertainty is eliminated when the President, upon the submission of a special interdepartmental commission, approves a specific list of information classified as state secret. The list is publicly available and cannot be changed arbitrarily.

It is useful for a journalist to know, even without looking at the List, which data are not to be classified. These include the following information:

Ø about emergencies and disasters that threaten the safety and health of the population, as well as natural disasters, their official forecasts and consequences;

Ø on the state of the environment, health, sanitation, demography, education, culture, agriculture, as well as on the state of crime;

Ø about privileges, compensations and benefits provided by the state;

Ø about violations of human and civil rights and freedoms;

Ø about the size of the gold reserve and state currency reserves of the Russian Federation;

Ø on the state of health of the highest officials of the Russian Federation;

Ø about the facts of violation of the law by state authorities and their officials.

Thus, a state secret is not a speculative category, invented to scare newsmen, but an exact list. Journalists have the right to get acquainted with him and appeal in court to attempts to expand it to protect departmental interests. Special attention should be given to the access of journalists to such information and the responsibility for its disclosure. The formal admission procedure is complex and multi-stage; it provides for the permission of the head of a government body or a security institution, as well as the consent of persons admitted to secrecy to temporarily limit their rights. It is unlikely that journalists, in their overwhelming majority, will ever find themselves in the role of such persons.

In a completely different perspective, situations appear when a correspondent, by the will of circumstances (and not officially) became the owner of classified information. According to the Criminal Code, responsibility is borne by persons to whom state secrets have been entrusted or have become known through service or work [9]. All disputes revolve around this parameter - after all, the reporter also collects information on business need. However, from the context of the legislation, it follows that working with state secrets is not part of the official functions of a journalist. It means that he is not overloaded with responsibility for its disclosure. Here is a typical illustration. When asked by the General Gazette about the leaks of secret information, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia reports that his department checks which staff members told the Moskovsky Komsomolets information about the number of MVD troops. The guilty may be held criminally liable. However, the minister does not even talk about sanctions against journalists.

Compared to state secrets, information about the private life of citizens constitutes, as it were, another pole of information security. In legal literature, the term “personal data” is used . The Law “On Information, Informatization and Protection of Information” gives the following definition: “information about citizens (personal data) - information about facts, events and circumstances of a citizen’s life, allowing to identify his personality”. The law prohibits the collection, storage, use and dissemination of information about private life, as well as information that violates a number of secrets: personal and family life, correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other communications, unless the individual himself or the court decides. It is envisaged that the list of personal data collected by state and other organizations should be fixed at the level of federal law. Finally, the activities of state organizations and individuals related to the processing and dissemination of personal data are subject to licensing.

As you can see, this array of information is unusually many-sided and does not lend itself to simple enumeration. Moreover, there are laws on various areas of activity in which special, professional restrictions are imposed on the use of personal information. For example, the Law “On Banks and Banking” closes unauthorized persons access to the secrets of private deposits and operations, the Law “On private detective and security activities” effectively prohibits non-state structures with hidden access to the privacy of citizens, medical legislation protects information about human health and his treatment to doctors, etc. [10] Thus, the preservation of personal secrets becomes the motive for establishing professional secrets.

The abundance of such norms and their dispersion in various legal documents encourage the development of special legislation on personal data. Another reason is the intensive development of electronic communications. If yesterday, to study a person’s medical history, it was necessary to get into the file of the attending physician, then today, when this information is recorded in computers, it has almost become publicly available. There was a danger of information leakage across state borders. That is why attention to this problem is exacerbated throughout the world.

In Russia, conceptual attitudes were formed for the competent use of personal information. So, in its composition there is information that, as a rule, it is inexpedient to classify (for example, background information, without which address tables could not operate and telephone books would not be published) - this means that they are also open for publication in the press. At the same time, semi-legal computer databases of confidential data are now offered to the media services. In disseminating such facts, extreme caution and scrupulousness are required. The communication of information about a person without his knowledge can be interpreted as a violation of personal interests, and for this legal responsibility is established. Under the Civil Code, a person who is hurt by an overly curious correspondent has the right to raise the question of compensation for moral harm.

Here are some typical situations. A photographic photographer captures the scandalous genre scene (say, a demonstration of political extremists), and in the frame its participants look like passers-by. According to the Law “On Mass Media”, he was obliged to take measures against the possible identification of unauthorized persons. Another example - the enemies of the reporter, the “dirt scavenger,” publish an article about how he was treated by a psychotherapist as a child. Or such a case: faced with the refusal of the filmmaker to give an interview, the resourceful radio journalist secretly turns on the tape recorder to record the telephone conversation of the master with the actress ...

Note that the hidden record is not excluded by law - it must be motivated by the observance of the constitutional rights and freedoms of the citizen and the protection of public interests. However, there are also significant details here: this provision applies to the recording of general plans (for example, a mass sports show), whereas for filming or recording a specific person, in any case, his consent is required.

Journalists are faced with the problem of protecting privacy and in a different capacity - sometimes they themselves become objects of unlawful surveillance and surveillance. The legislation of the Russian Federation prohibits the conduct of operational-search measures to collect information about the private life of citizens, if this is not a way to combat crimes. The reason for excessive interest in the media is their professional activity. About one of these stories told the newspaper "Izvestia". An employee of Komsomolskaya Pravda understood that they were following her after she published a series of critical articles about the regional police. She not only filed a petition with the prosecutor’s office, but also sent a complaint to the Constitutional Court, in which she challenged a number of provisions of the Law “On Operational-Search Activity”. So the police theme of her articles was developed in the form of public public activities.

If society is increasingly protecting its privacy secrets, then it is not very supportive of business secrets . The legislation establishes a sufficiently precise framework that does not allow for the secrecy of any information of a production and economic nature according to the personal desire of its owner.

First, information, to be considered a secret, must simultaneously meet a number of criteria: it must be that it has real or potential commercial value due to the unknown to outsiders, that access to it is legally closed and that its owner takes measures to protect confidentiality . Secondly, the Russian Government approved a list of information that cannot constitute a commercial secret. These include: constituent documents, articles of association and other similar documents of the company, information on solvency, wages and working conditions of workers, on environmental pollution, violation of antitrust laws, on the size of property and cash, etc. paying taxes. All this is open to the press (as well as for other citizens) data that the company is obliged to provide by editorial request. We add that if a journalist has become acquainted with a commercial secret by legal means (for example, through the same request for information), he is not responsible for disclosing it.