Facing criticism of a bill to protect the government's special secrets, the Abe administration and the ruling parties — the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito — proposed to amend the bill. But their proposals are a sham since they retain the basic character of the bill — that is, allowing the government to designate information related to security, diplomacy, counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism as special secrets almost without limits and heavily restricting people's access to such information by imposing severe penalties on government workers who leak such information and ordinary citizens, such as journalists, who try to obtain it. The opposition parties should not be duped by such amendment proposals. They should concentrate on disclosing the dangerous nature of the bill through Diet discussions with the aim of getting it killed.

Prison terms of up to 10 years will be given to national public servants who leak special secrets and prison terms of up to five years to ordinary citizens who try to get such information. The bill unduly expands the scope of information that can be designated as special secrets by widely using the phrase "and other." It also allows the government to renew designations of special secrets every five years, thus enabling it to hide such secrets from the public indefinitely.

Ensuring the people's right to know what their government is doing is a foundation of democracy. It is obvious that the secrecy bill undermines not only freedom of the press and the people's right to know but also the fundamental constitutional principle that "sovereign power rests with the people." Given the nature of the bill, what the opposition parties must do is clear: Make every effort to force the government and the ruling parties to abandon the bill.