Malaysia heading towards OSA Society or Information Society?

A second illustration are the cyberbills to be presented to the current Parliamentary meeting. Four cyberbills have been mentioned, on digital signatures, computer crimes, multimedia intellectual property and telemedicine development.

At minimum, an “Information Society” is one where information are increasingly accessible and democratic and where citizens can be fully engaged in the government decision-making process.

However, the cyberbills have been formulated in the greatest secrecy and neither the public, MPs nor the professional organisations directly affected by the cyberbills like the Bar Council or the Malaysian Medical Association had been consulted in any manner.

I had tried to contact the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister to ask for the cyberbills so that public feedbacks could be given at the DAP ‘IT For All” Conference held at the Federal Hotel, Kuala Lumpur last Sunday. Although Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had assured me personally on Friday that the granting of my request should not be a problem, and left instructions to his office to arrange for me to get copies of the cyberbills on Saturday as he had to leave for Karachi for the OIC Conference, the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office was unable to get me the cyberbills although it tried the whole of Saturday morning. The Deputy Prime Minister’s Office promised my Office that if they could not get the cyberbills by Saturday, they would be made available by yesterday - but again it was unable to fulfil this undertaking.

I understand the problem lay with the Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and Posts and it is clear that there is an urgent need for a thorough indoctrination of the Cabinet Ministers and top government officers to prepare them to acquire the mindset appropriate for the development of an information society.

If Cabinet Ministers strategically placed in the Ministries responsible for guiding the country to take the quantum leap into the Information Age themselves do not understand the meaning of information society, and could act as obtacles to such a national effort, as by blocking the early publication of cyberbills although this had been cleared by the Prime Minister’s Office, something is very indeed very wrong.

As it is, despite all the hypes about IT, the Information Society and the Information Age, Malaysia is not heading towards an Information Society but an OSA society, where all government information are classified as “official secrets”, and anyone who have unauthorised access would be guilty of an offence which entails a mandatory minimum jail sentence for one year.

A country with such an OSA law cannot be serious in wanting to make the transition towards an Information Society, and the repeal of such and other similar restrictive legislation is clearly a prerequisite before Malaysia can become an information society.

I had hoped that with the introduction of the first batch of cyberlaws, the government would take the first step towards an Information Society by making use of information technologies to consult citizens on a wide range of issues, and even posting the cyberbills on the Internet to welcome feedbacks and inputs from the larger cybercommunity.

In fact, as a result of IT, it is now easier and faster to post publications on the Internet than to print out the hard copies, and this is why I had proposed that the government should post the cyberbills on the Internet. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister’s speeches are readily available on the net, but there seems to be still great reluctance to post government information on the net to get public feedbacks and inputs.

Malaysia urgently needs a National IT Agenda and an Action Plan. DAP proposes that the country should formulate a IT 2005 Rolling Action Plan to chart the Malaysian Way to an Information Society which should include a mid-term framework for the year 2,000.

Let me refer to ten important aspects which should be considered for incorporation in such a National IT Agenda and Action Plan.