Suppose you are concerned that some variants of a policy you're thinking about may be legal or illegal. There is a pretty large gray area. You could corner the relevant legal mind after lunch, and ask his opinion. Then there is no recording, only your memory.
Or you could email him, and get a more considered opinion. This is likely to lead to better policies. But perhaps some of the options you're considering are a bit controversial, and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about) is risky if your email may be subject to a FOI request. So perhaps you re-write it very carefully avoiding the worst options, or perhaps you run it past the PR people before emailing, or perhaps you give up and ask in the pub instead. These all seem like worse outcomes, and ones we should be careful not to encourage.
> and stating bluntly what you really mean (and what you are concerned about)
In the end, people aren't judged for this. They're judged for the actions that they take, and then communications like this are used for context. If your decision is so bad that they had to make a FOI request to find out how spurious your reasoning was, then I don't see why you should have the protection of having no paper trail. That's insanity.
I wish that were true, but it more often seems they're judged by the worst dirt that can be made to stick. And they know it.
In reality if a politician makes a genuine error or prediction that turns out to be wrong he will face demands that he resigns for deliberately misleading the public. The media have created this toxic environment where normal debate and discourse is impossible
Otherwise, what we get is a totalitarian class society divided between 'those that know the secrets' and 'those that do not'.
Secret meetings are the opposite of open society.
It's a most unfortunate dilemma, but it's a strong, well-documented phenomenon and you can't wish it away.
An example of groupthink:
I've been in a room, chairing a meeting, where everyone agreed on a definite course of action. Full consensus (except me).
When I asked each person after the meeting what they personally wanted, literally 100% of them disagreed with the decision they had affirmatively consented to. The actual decision was something nobody wanted. The option was only even brought up because people believed (wrongly) that other people would want it.
All of them "went along" with what they believed was the view of others in the room. They wanted lower friction; nobody wanted problems from dissenting (which includes time wasted in meetings due to believing there are different views to reconcile, even when that isn't actually true).
Unfortunately all guessed incorrectly what the view of others was, then went along with their guess.
When it's a big decision, it's tragic when that happens. Public duty has a lot of those.
When performing public duty, you must have transparency, and avoid corruption, but you also must have intelligent group information sharing, reasoning and decisions.
But you can't have them all. Wishing won't make it so. Choose your poison.
Or better, choose a multi-layered system with well-placed compromises to get both intelligence and transparency in some measure, in whatever arrangement provides best results.
I like what the Chatham House Rule wikipedia page says on this:
> It is designed to reduce the risk of what has come to be described as groupthink, where unpopular views are excluded from discussion, reducing the range of opinions an organisation can discuss.
With regards to corruption, one theory is that you need enough transparency that corruption cannot thrive; beyond that you get diminishing returns along with negative consequences in other areas. For a manufacturing analogy to corruption: To perform quality assurance that a batch of components is good, you don't need to measure every component, you only need to measure a random subset, chosen by the tester.
The issue: Using Signal to to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Government officials are legally required to keep records of decision making and discussions made in official capacity. If they use discussions over Signal to make decisions, they should write memos and archive them. Just because the media they use is not doing it for the does not relieve them from the duty.