The Dialectics of Naming and Concealment: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Anti-Alias Imperative, State Secrecy, and the Limits of Legal Form in the Realm of Confidential Intelligence
The Dialectics of Naming and Concealment: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Anti-Alias Imperative, State Secrecy, and the Limits of Legal Form in the Realm of Confidential Intelligence
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
August 13, 2026
In the theater of constitutional accountability that is the Philippine impeachment trial, a fleeting exchange between Senator-Judge Bam Aquino and state auditor Xylene Del Campo crystallizes a deeper philosophical tension. Aquino invokes Republic Act No. 6085—the statute amending Commonwealth Act No. 142 that regulates the use of aliases—and asks whether the auditor is aware of a law prohibiting the use of names other than those registered at birth, baptism, or judicial authorization. Del Campo’s admission of unfamiliarity, followed by Aquino’s suggestion of pertinence to confidential and intelligence funds (CIF), opens onto a question that is at once juridical, political, and ontological: What is the status of the name in a polity that simultaneously demands transparency of identity and authorizes opacity for the sake of security?
The user’s intuition—that RA 6085 was never intended to encompass the operational aliases of informants, agents, or the administrative shadows that accompany CIF disbursements—is not merely a pragmatic observation. It is the entry point into a richer meditation on the relationship between legal form, state necessity, and the philosophical status of the proper name.
### I. The Ontology of the Name and the Prohibition of Multiplicity
A name is never merely a label. In the Western metaphysical tradition that still underwrites modern civil registry systems, the name participates in the identity of the bearer. From the biblical “I am who I am” through the Scholastic doctrine of *suppositum* to the modern bureaucratic apparatus of the civil registry, the stable name functions as the guarantor of legal personality, contractual capacity, and moral responsibility. Commonwealth Act No. 142, as amended by RA 6085, enacts this metaphysics into positive law: except for the narrow aesthetic exemptions of literature, cinema, athletics, and the judicially authorized substitute, no person shall use a name different from the one with which he or she was registered at birth or baptized. The statute’s original historical target—the commercial multiplicity of names practiced by certain Chinese merchants—reveals its deeper purpose: the prevention of confusion and fraud through the stabilization of civil identity.
Yet this stabilization is itself a political act. The prohibition of the alias is the state’s assertion of monopoly over the conditions of recognition. To name is to bring into the light of the public; to use an unauthorized alias is to attempt a private re-founding of the self outside the sovereign’s gaze. The law therefore treats habitual, public use of an unauthorized name as a crime precisely because such use threatens the intelligibility of the legal order.
Jurisprudence has already softened the edges of this absolute claim. In *Ursua v. Court of Appeals*, the Supreme Court insisted that the prohibited “alias” is a name used *publicly and habitually*, usually in business transactions, with the intention of being known by that name in addition to the real one. A single, isolated, private deployment does not satisfy the *mens rea* or the actus of the offense. The decision introduces a crucial distinction between the public performance of identity and the private or confidential transaction—an opening through which the entire apparatus of intelligence work might pass.
### II. The Exception that Cannot Speak Its Name: Secrecy as Political Theology
The user’s observation is therefore correct in its essential insight: the anti-alias statute does not, on its face or in its historical purpose, address the operational necessities of state security. The PNP, AFP, NBI, PDEA, and the various intelligence services routinely assign code names, operational aliases, and cut-outs precisely because the public disclosure of true identity would destroy the very capacity for information gathering that the state claims as a legitimate function. Confidential and intelligence funds exist under Joint Circular No. 2015-01 precisely to finance such activities—purchase of information, maintenance of safe houses, payments to non-employee informers—under conditions where ordinary procurement and identity disclosure would compromise the operation.
Here we encounter a classic problem in political philosophy: the relationship between the rule of law and the exception. Carl Schmitt’s insight that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception finds a quieter, more bureaucratic expression in the Philippine administrative state. The CIF regime is an institutionalized exception. It is not that the anti-alias law contains an explicit carve-out for intelligence work; rather, the entire domain of confidential funds operates in a zone where the ordinary requirements of civil identity are suspended by necessity and by the silence of the governing circular. The circular is “neither allowed nor prohibited” regarding aliases, as former COA auditors have testified, because the logic of the regime presupposes a different ontology of the person: the informant or agent is not a civil subject appearing in the public forum but a function within a clandestine network.
This silence is not accidental. It is the legal expression of what Giorgio Agamben has called the *state of exception* that has become the permanent paradigm of government. In the zone of CIF, the name is no longer the index of legal personality but a tactical instrument. The alias is not a violation of the law of names; it is the condition of possibility for the state’s claim to protect the very order that the law of names seeks to uphold. The philosophical paradox is acute: the state that demands the transparency of every private citizen simultaneously requires the opacity of its own agents.
### III. Accountability, Recognition, and the Dialectic of Visibility
The impeachment context sharpens the paradox. The demand that recipients of confidential funds appear under their civil names is a demand for *accountability* in the classical sense: the capacity to give an account, to answer, to be answerable. Yet the very structure of intelligence work makes such answerability lethal or self-defeating. The philosophical question therefore becomes: Can a polity that claims to be constitutional sustain two incompatible regimes of naming—one of radical publicity for the ordinary subject, one of radical anonymity for the agents of security—without the second eventually corroding the first?
One possible resolution lies in the distinction between *public* and *confidential* use already latent in *Ursua*. The anti-alias law targets the public performance of a false identity that creates confusion in the civil and commercial sphere. The operational alias of an informant, used only within the sealed circuit of intelligence reporting and never presented as a civil identity in open transactions, may fall outside the statute’s protective concern. Another resolution is institutional rather than interpretive: the creation of a formal, audited, but still confidential system of alias registration within the intelligence community itself—an internal civil registry of shadows that remains invisible to the public yet accountable to a specialized oversight body.
Yet neither resolution dissolves the deeper philosophical tension. The proper name is the site where the individual is recognized as a person before the law. When the state itself systematically withholds or multiplies names in the name of security, it performs a quiet ontological violence: it treats certain human beings not as persons but as functions, expendable instruments whose identity can be rewritten or erased according to operational need. The informant paid under the name “Mary Grace Piattos” or “Mickey Mouse” is simultaneously protected and depersonalized. Protection and depersonalization are two faces of the same power.
### IV. Summative Conclusion: The Name Between Law and Necessity
The exchange in the impeachment court is therefore more than a technical query about the applicability of RA 6085 to confidential funds. It is a momentary disclosure of the unresolved dialectic that structures the modern security state. The anti-alias law embodies the liberal-republican ideal of transparent, stable, singular identity as the foundation of legal personality and democratic accountability. The practice of operational aliases under the CIF regime embodies the realist recognition that certain functions of the state cannot be performed under the conditions of full visibility.
There is, as the user correctly senses, a deliberate and necessary gap. RA 6085 does not “cover” the security alias because the security alias belongs to a different order of political reason—the order of necessity, secrecy, and the exception. To force the security alias into the Procrustean bed of the civil-name statute would either cripple intelligence work or empty the statute of its meaning by creating a de facto exception so broad that the rule itself collapses.
The philosophical task is not to eliminate the tension but to keep it visible and under continuous critical scrutiny. A polity that forgets the cost of its own necessary opacities risks sliding into a permanent state of exception in which the name itself becomes a disposable administrative fiction. Conversely, a polity that refuses all opacity in the name of absolute transparency risks rendering itself defenseless against those who operate without scruple under multiple masks. The name, in the end, is both the foundation of recognition and the first instrument of concealment. Between these two powers the constitutional order must continually renegotiate its own conditions of possibility.
In the silence of the COA circular and the unfamiliarity of the auditor, we hear not merely bureaucratic gap but the unresolved question of political modernity itself: how to name the agents of the state without either dissolving their effectiveness or dissolving the persons they once were.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™' s connection to the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) serves as a defining pillar of his professional journey, most recently celebrated through the launch of the ACC Global Alumni Network.As a 2003 Starr Foundation Grantee, Roldan participated in a transformative ten-month fellowship in the United States. This opportunity allowed him to observe contemporary art movements, engage with an international community of artists and curators, and develop a new body of work that bridges local and global perspectives.Featured Work: Bridges Beyond Borders His featured work, Bridges Beyond Borders: ACC's Global Cultural Collaboration, has been chosen as the visual identity for the newly launched ACC Global Alumni Network.Symbol of Connection: The piece represents a private collaborative space designed to unite over 6,000 ACC alumni across various disciplines and regions.Artistic Vision: The work embodies the ACC's core mission of advancing international dialogue and cultural exchange to foster a more harmonious world.Legacy of Excellence: By serving as the face of this initiative, Roldan's art highlights the enduring impact of the ACC fellowship on his career and his role in the global artistic community.Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
He is a Filipino multidisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, painter, independent curator, researcher, writer, and cultural worker whose practice spans contemporary art, curatorial work, and cultural advocacy. He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
He has been active in the Philippine art scene since the late 1990s and has worked with galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and international cultural organizations.His practice appears to represent several interconnected concerns:
Cultural work as artistic practice. Roldan has argued that the labor of curating, organizing exhibitions, teaching, documentation, and cultural administration should be understood as creative work rather than merely support work. This perspective has been reflected in his writings and exhibitions.
Social and political engagement. His artworks frequently address politics, religion, faith, denial, courage, social inequality, and the everyday experiences of Filipinos. He has stated that he draws inspiration from Filipino cultural practices while approaching painting, printmaking, and installation from a conceptual perspective.Printmaking and conceptual art.Roldan is particularly recognized for his printmaking, with works shown internationally, including exhibitions in Japan and France. His practice also encompasses painting, photography, installation, and curatorial research.International cultural exchange. A significant milestone in his career was receiving an Asian Cultural Council fellowship in 2003, which enabled him to undertake research and create work in the United States while engaging with artists and curators internationally.
More broadly, Roldan's work represents an attempt to bridge artistic production, curatorial practice, scholarship, and cultural activism . His writings often emphasize postcolonial discourse, cultural memory, and the ethics of artistic collaboration, positioning the artist not only as a maker of objects but also as a builder of cultural infrastructure.
In the Philippine contemporary art context, he can be understood as representing the figure of the artist-curator-cultural worker —someone who contributes both through making artworks and through developing exhibitions, mentoring artists, and fostering institutional and independent cultural initiatives.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
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