Official Secrecy as an Element of Ensuring National Security of Russia

Official secrecy as one of the methods of protecting state-relevant information in connection with significant legislative changes that occurred in connection with the adoption of the Law of the Russian Federation “On State Secrets” in the early 90s of the twentieth century, has passed a difficult path of formation and development in new socio-political conditions. At one time, it was an information resource formed by the state administration bodies of the USSR to protect the most important departmental information that is not related to state secrets. At the same time, the institute of official secrecy represented a unified administrative and legal regime for the protection of such information throughout the state, almost identical to the regime for the protection of state secrets. Since 1993, in connection with the adoption of the Law of the Russian Federation “On State Secrets”, the official secret in the form in which it existed before, actually disappeared. Without any serious grounds, all information previously protected under the heading “secret” was automatically classified as a state secret, which significantly expanded its scope, although the purpose of the adoption of the above-mentioned legislative act was precisely to reduce the volume of information protected in this regime. Since that period, official secrecy has been under conditions of legal uncertainty, which, it seems, did not work towards needs of the State in the real protection of state-significant information. A huge number of different databases containing various information related to the activities of state authorities and state organizations, providing access to their content via the Internet require the formation of a new universal administrative and legal regime that allows effective protection of such information from various illegal actions, including access from foreign states and organizations. The introduction of the category of “official secrets in the field of defense” into legislation in 2021 indicates the increasing importance of this category of information for ensuring the national security of the state. The present work reveals the main problems associated with the legitimization of official secrets at this stage of the development of our state.