Category: cyberlibel

ressa, keng, and the NBI

feb 15.  caught karen davila with guest maria ressa on headstart.  na-dejavu ako.  i first met the two over a private lunch in a fancy hotel some 8 years ago, but that’s another story,

much more interesting is this cyberlibel case filed against ressa for an article rappler posted in 2012.  check out abs-cbn news‘ Timeline: Rappler, Maria Ressa’s cyber libel case.

check out also the updated (in 2014) version  of the 2012 article CJ using SUVs of ‘controversial’ businessmen.

the rappler article says that the information on wilfredo keng was based on an intelligence report prepared in 2002 that rappler got hold of and which detailed keng’s past.

The report stated that Keng had been under surveillance by the National Security Council for alleged involvement in illegal activities, namely “human trafficking and drug smuggling.” He is supposedly close to lawmakers and had contacts with the US embassy at the time.

curiously, CMFR’s vergel santos in a feb 14 ANC interview said that it is the NBI that should be charged with libel.

VERGEL SANTOS. …the man who is accusing rappler of libel is saying that he was not the sort of man that certain intelligence reports make him out to be.  not rappler by the way…  he should libel the NBI, not rappler.  rappler was simply reporting what he is made out to be in certain reports.  it’s perfectly clear and straighforward reporting.   (7:50 = 7:14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVARBtsVtfs

the NBI?  the NBI was not mentioned at all in the updated article.  but on headstart, davila repeated santos’s gripe for ressa’s lawyer (who was also on cam from some other location) to comment on, but i didn’t quite get the gist of jj disini’s convoluted response.

QUESTION.  sa NBI nga ba galing ang intell report?  paano nalaman ni vergel santos?  was that information contained in the original article but edited out of the 2014 updated version?  if yes, why?  maybe because the document was obtained and used by rappler without the knowledge and permission of the NBI?

and then there’s  this, from keng’s official statement dated feb 14.  meron daw siyang NBI clearance.

Rappler, Ressa and Santos never attempted to obtain my side on the crimes they wrongly imputed to me or to fact-check their baseless attacks against my name. I have never had a criminal record. For almost four decades since I started working, I have consistently secured official clearance from the National Bureau of Investigation certifying that I have never been involved in any criminal case and have never had any criminal history. Since the 1980’s, I have never been investigated by or summoned before any law enforcement agency in connection with any alleged criminal act, much less have I been indicted, arrested, detained or convicted of any crime in the Philippines. Further, the National Bureau of Investigation, as the central repository and chief administrator of the country’s criminal history records, would never have found in my favor and filed the complaint against Rappler, along with its concerned officers and reporter, for cyber libel concerning defamatory imputation of crime if had any criminal record or history in their files.

so.  ano ba talaga, ressa?  ano ba talaga, NBI?  who is telling the truth?  did ressa make up that intell report?  if not, how did she get hold of it?

in his official statement, sey din ni keng:

Upon seeing the libelous article and prior to resorting to judicial remedies, I tried to formally and informally communicate with Rappler in order to have the said article taken down, clear my name and restore my reputation, at least, to the extent possible given the fact that irreparable damage had already been done, multiplied a million-fold because Rappler’s website continues to be accessible by the whole world. In turn, Rappler, likewise through formal and informal channels, repeatedly promised me that they will take down the subject article, but never did. The libelous attacks remain posted on their website until now.  [bold mine]

*irreparable damage has multiplied a million-fold* … hmmm.  is that in pesos, as in millions of pesoses lost?

as expected, social media is awash with information on wilfredo keng — ito ba talaga ang gusto niyang mangyari?

going viral, for instance, is a facebook post, WHO IS WILFREDO KENG? with data from the Philippine Stock Exchange website and DENR.  it would seem that 2017 was “an exciting year for keng.”  and 2018 too, it would seem, given this: Century Peak picked to undertake PPP reclamation project in Cavite.  

rappler‘s article doesn’t seem to have stopped the duterte admin from awarding him big ticket projects.  and he certainly took long enough, waited, it would seem, almost five years before, umm, pouncing on ressa?  as if, on cue?

and then there’s this facebook status of friend steve “based on his observation of the cast of usual suspects.”

STEVE SALONGA. There is a deliberate all-media campaign to capitalize on the Ressa case. Ostensibly for election purposes but with the hope of some magical rainbow coalition forming to oust the President.  The president has no known relationship with the private complainant.

here’s hoping ressa is preparing to mount a serious defense rather than counting on extrajudicial and / or magical measures, as in, an edsa-for-ressa, what a punchline, and to what end?  edsas are for ousting presidents in the hope of systemic change, not for demanding…what?…uh, that the NBI and the BIR drop all charges against ressa?  or else, what?  and will setting her free to publish what she pleases solve any of the problems besetting nation today?

not in a million years.

Internet freedom and cybercrime

We are all affected by this law. All users of mobile phones are vulnerable. So are those who are Internet media savvy as well as occasional users of the Internet. Most of our landlines pass through the net nowadays which makes all of electronic communication vulnerable. It poses dangers to ordinary people that comments on inequities heaped upon them by society.

~ Giovanni Tapang, PH.D.

Information control

By Luis Teodoro

CONTROLLING THE flow of information — deciding what citizens are told, how it’s presented to them and even determining what they should and shouldn’t know — has always been a critical concern among the powerful. Whether in the Philippines, its neighbors, or in the most backward or most developed countries of the world, the kind of information that reaches citizens is crucial to the outcome of elections, the making of the policies that decide the quality of life of millions, the staying power of dictators, and even the prospects for war or peace.

The entire planet is inundated with tsunamis of information daily, thanks to the international media organizations’ relentless transmission of reports, commentary and images via cable, print and the Internet. The swift advance of information and communication technology has also made national borders of no consequence to filtering information. At the national level, radio, TV and print assail the senses daily in most countries including those yet to achieve the same level of development as Japan and most Western nations.

But only at first blush does the control of information seem futile. For all the billions of characters, bytes and pixels they transmit daily, the world’s biggest media conglomerates, thanks to the incessant mergers and acquisitions that have made them a mere handful (seven media conglomerates have a global monopoly over news and entertainment), share a homogenous view of the world. Built into the international media system is a common perspective rooted in the culture and politics of the handful of Western countries where the global media organizations had their origins. This perspective is inevitably, and often unknowingly, assimilated by the broadcasters, reporters, and commentators in the countries where the international corporate media have a monopoly over the transmission of news and entertainment from the rest of the world.

A homogenous view of the world has taken root in most countries, where how events in the Middle East, Asia, the Americas, Africa and anywhere else are perceived is crucial to the making of public opinion. The consequence is the absorption on a nearly universal scale of values and ideas that taken together constitute the most formidable obstacle to change even in the most desperate of circumstances, human consciousness and perception being a critical factor in the transformation of nations and the world.

The Philippines’ recent experience with two bills — one already a law, the constitutionality of which will be debated in the Supreme Court in January, the other practically on its last gasps in the 15th Congress — is instructive. The control of information-what and how much citizens need to learn about themselves, their governance, and the rest of their society — is basically what drove the almost immediate passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, and what has prevented the Freedom of Information bill, after nearly two decades, from being passed.

The FOI bill, despite nearly two decades of debate and discussion, and, during the Aquino III administration, the drafting of at least three versions, has aroused the most violent opposition in the House of Representatives. And yet, an FOI Act has been in place in Thailand for years. Even Pakistan has one. It is not particularly revolutionary, and an FOI act should have long ago been part of the country’s laws.

The version of the Freedom of Information bill that’s still up for discussion in the House plenary even falls below the standards to which the United Nations encourages compliance. It enshrines executive privilege in law, exempts from public access information on “national security” — a particularly contentious phrase in this country because of its experience with authoritarian rule — and leaves it to the President to declare as an exception any information that in his opinion falls under that category.

As passed by the House committee on public information, the FOI bill doesn’t have the “sunshine provision” that would automatically make information exempt from public scrutiny available after a specific period. Instead, the bill leaves such a declaration to the President’s discretion. Inputs in discussions over policy are also exempt from disclosure, thus preventing citizens from participation in the making of public policy.

Despite these provisions that actually favor State secrecy, resistance to the FOI bill remains strong in the House of Representatives, and its fate as of this writing (December 20) was still uncertain, since Congress adjourns for the holiday recess today, December 21. The scope and power of the opposition to it is indicative of the mindset among the country’s power elite that regards information as dangerous, and looks at the citizenry as immature, of limited capacity for discernment, or likely to abuse its own freedoms to be worthy of the information that’s readily available to the powerful and privileged. For all the ringing rhetoric, however, the very bottom line is that Philippine officialdom has too many secrets it would rather not be made public.

The fear of the citizenry is evident in the severe restrictions the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 puts in place against those who regularly use the Internet to report and comment on issues of public concern — most of them ordinary citizens who have discovered the empowering character of the new media. The Act punishes free expression by ordinary citizens even more harshly than the 82-year-old libel law does professional journalists.

To what end this enthusiasm for curtailing free expression and this resistance to access to information? In the hostility to an FOI act is not only the fear that the media would be even more powerful. Implicit in that fear is fear of citizen empowerment as well. What makes governments suspicious of the press is that it can — and it is no more than a possibility — provide the public with, among others, the information it needs on the problems and issues of governance and society, what they mean, and, either directly or indirectly, what the possible solutions are. The media by themselves have no power beyond shaping the consciousness of their audiences, the power to change things being ultimately resident in the citizenry.

Change in the country of our sorrows is possible only when the realities of poverty and injustice are in conjunction with citizen consciousness of the roots and causes of those realities. It’s an awareness that could lead to the exploration of possible solutions. The Philippine experience demonstrates that information is crucial in the shaping of the predisposition for change and citizen openness to the means as to how it may be achieved. It is the absence among the people of meaningful information that has made change of any kind in the Philippines problematic. It is the instinct to keep things as they are that makes control of information so crucial to the Philippine elite.

Dismissal won’t make us go away

By Marian Pastor Roces

We are told off: with freedom comes responsibility.

As though we didn’t know. As though we — the cyber-throng quick-witted enough to recognize bs thrown at us — don’t know, uhhhm, shit.

The reminder itself insults. It reminds us instead that the Philippines’ leaders think so very little of her citizens. Reminds us that this contempt for the populace is precisely the prevailing culture of its leadership—a culture that consumes cynical and idealist political, ecclessiastical, tradjorno leaders alike.

These authorities dismiss our outrage as hysteria. They know no better than to denigrate a remarkable show of smarts, wit, grace, inventiveness, and in fact wisdom, in the face of the grave threat to democratic space.

So they — and their mouth-pieces — talk down to us. Comporting themselves as though Medieval bishops speaking from on high, they deign teach us about democracy. About responsibility. Us! The citizenry that in the last quarter century has been consistently quicker than its leaders and its mainstream narrators in defining the possibilities and responsibilities of democracy.

Oh, and our own living-dead Medieval frailocracy have naturally joined the pious pantheon, none of whom have read Orwell’s “1984,” and perhaps for this reason have neither sense of irony nor foreboding. It took the netizens to point out the awful choice of date That Law came to pass.

But were it only illiteracy, perhaps our leaders deserve our patience. Trouble is, sheer illogic hobbles their attempts at Reason. They consign sundry critics on fb to the same criminal status as child porn traffickers and identity thieves, but this does not strike them as monstrous. They bandy Constitutional guarantees of the very freedom of expression they constrict. This does not seem to them oxymoronic. Or moronic.

Preposterously, they actually think netizens desire impunity—to libel freely, to shirk penalty—where the call from the netscape is for a deeply informed understanding of the radically interactive nature of digital media, with its built-in self-policing nature.

Self-policing systems are necessarily upheld by democracies (and feared and controlled by autocratic states, needless to say) because in allowing the individual citizen the same power as the big actors, at least for a minute or two, it does move societies in the direction of equality.

So it is now the citizenry, again, taking the high moral ground in this fracas. We first of all enjoin our leaders to get off their hoary paternalistic platforms, to breathe the envigorating air of that democratic space where Filipinos thrive on sharpened skills to spot and contest lies and manipulations.

Listen, then, oh grand leaders and inquisitors.

We have no use for the freedom to libel.

What’s at stake is the freedom to challenge the impunity of the powerful, as we go about our daily convivial, sometimes testy, and sure, often foolish chatter.

We have no desire to shirk responsibility, and because of this we trounce trolls quickly, quarrel with the reckless and fiendish on line, and think before we click.

What’s at stake is right of netizens to keep for ourselves the responsibility for maintaining healthy exchange in the ethereal and physical communities we live in. Not to surrender this responsibility to Big Brother.

We have no big urge to drag the unwilling into our newfangled netizenship that demands a savvy grasp of the technological enabling of democracy, and its dangers.

What’s at stake is an idea whose time is now: the separation of net and State apparatus. It is a separation built on the distinction between traditional media which historically has merged too often with State power; and the net, which proliferates imagined communities beyond the myriad imprisonments and impunities of the past.

What’s at stake is the fast-track education of our leaders, so they know how absurd and perilous it is to try to retrofit ancient repressive methods on people power revved up by 21st c tech. They have to step up and recognize the Filipino body politic as uniquely adept at discerning pivotal difference.

That body politic knows that the net diffuses centralized power. That traditional media consolidated power despite the best efforts of great journalists. That the net subverts gate keepers and power brokers. That traditional media yielded to these creatures. That the net has thus far disabled—where traditional media were often the precisely the media for—elite capture of resources, discussion, and the shaping of society.

What’s at stake is the progressively sophisticated use of a locally-formed computer literacy to advance a century old Philippine freedom agenda. Freedom from repressive overlords.