Balancing State Secrecy and Freedom of Expression in the Context of Security and Intelligence Whistleblowing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines the legal constraints imposed on UK Security and Intelligence Service (SIS) whistleblowers, focusing on the compatibility of s 1 (1) of the Official Secrets Act 1989 with the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the ECHR. It argues that s 1 (1) is incompatible with Article 10 because it imposes an absolute prohibition on unauthorised disclosures, denying SIS personnel a statutory public interest defence and preventing meaningful judicial scrutiny. This framework undermines democratic accountability and the rule of law by shielding executive action from judicial scrutiny and restricting access to information that may expose illegality, abuse of power, or threats to public safety. Employing a critical doctrinal methodology and a functional comparative analysis of Canadian law, the thesis evaluates the application of proportionality, public interest, and judicial deference in UK and ECtHR jurisprudence. It develops a structured framework for assessing judicial reasoning in national security cases and demonstrates that UK courts frequently default to reasonableness review, affording deference to executive definitions of national security. The analysis identifies three interrelated constitutional failings: the absence of a public interest defence, the prevalence of judicial deference, and the protean nature of ‘national security’. The thesis makes four interrelated contributions: it provides a sustained doctrinal focus on s 1 (1) of the OSA 1989; unites the three constitutional failings within a single analytical framework; introduces a comparative perspective through Canada’s Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act 2024; and advances a reform model grounded in modified deliberative democratic and procedural theory. Drawing on Canada’s framework, it assesses the viability of a structured public interest defence within the UK context. It concludes that such a defence is both feasible and necessary to ensure accountability in cases involving serious wrongdoing. By addressing legal and constitutional deficiencies, this thesis offers a doctrinally grounded and theoretically informed model for reform, capable of guiding future legislative development, strengthening oversight mechanisms, and reinforcing rights-based protections in the national security context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".