Colonial officials and newspapers routinely breached boundaries between official and non-official record

Evidence

Sometimes the borders that define the “official” and the “non-official” are hard to trace. Government civil servants wrote in newspapers, newspapers culled from official records to which they were not suppose to have access. Leaks soaked through and across confidential missives, private letters, and the sequestered archival page. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 105