Category: information

operation snowden

fascinating true-to-life political drama.  the whole world is snowden’s stage, even if we don’t know exactly where he is.  and who to believe.  meanwhile the wired world is on edge. privacy is no small matter.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations by Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras

Edward Snowden, NSA files source: ‘If they want to get you, in time they will’ by Ewen MacAskill

My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be … by Naomi Wolf (Notes)

My creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be … (updated) by Naomi Wolf

Obama’s Infatuation with the Espionage Act by Bill Simpich

Wonkbook: Does Edward Snowden even exist? by Ezra Klein and Evan Solta

The NSA’s Intelligence-Industrial Complex by Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson

Greenwald Blasts Critics Who Claim He ‘Aided And Abetted’ Snowden: ‘I Call That Investigative Journalism’ by Matt Wilstein

Hide and leak: Where is Edward Snowden?

 

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.

environment 6: beyond transparency

BEYOND TRANSPARENCY

Junie Kalaw

The launching of the Coalition for Transparency in Government provided President Corazon Aquino an opportunity to focus on a quality of governance whose absence from the national scene has been a major impediment to honest political and social reform. It was acknowledged that the lack of transparency has served to encourage and hide corruption and protect the vested interests of politicians and their business partners. It was also accepted that its presence should be an important mechanism for the participation of people in development. But what is not often pointed out is that transparency has an active dimension: it involves publicly disclosing and revealing what is in mere storage. Deliberate secrecy in government transactions is a crime against transparency.

It has been argued that the transparency of government was proven by the explosive headlines merited by such anomalies as the congressional fondness for overpriced coconut juice, sleek uzis, and smuggled cars. There is a sense, however, in which these thunderous dramas actually obscured the larger issue of the continuing legitimized plunder of our natural resources by a privileged few through multinational land tenure, forest logging concessions, and foreign mining and fishing operations. Real transparency has to begin with a disclosure of the involvement of public officials in the primary exploitation of natural resources, and this obviously is a responsibility of the state, which controls all access.

Within the context of development (the professed objective of all governments), the most relevant, and at the same time simplest, question to ask is: who will benefit from it? Land reform for whom? Selective logging for whom? In short, development for whom? In the interests of transparency, it must also be asked who should plan for development. And since the great majority of Filipinos today live below the poverty line, the issue is not just economic in nature but concerns the structural stability of Philippine society.

Upon examination of the mechanisms government has made available to the people to enable them to participate creatively in the democratic planning process, it seems that government did not sufficiently understand that it could actually be adding to the general muddiness. Public hearings, for example, were attended mostly by politicians and businessmen with personal vested interests. The Senate hearings on the log ban bill were attended mostly by loggers and government bureaucrats. There was no representation from the ethnic groups, upland dwellers, small fishermen, and farmers who are most affected by the continuing denudation of forests. The consultative conferences government held with academics included non-government organizations (NGOs). But these consultations were really just venues for the legitimization of the sponsor’s position with no provisions for feedback from divergent positions, let alone their resolution.

The Aquino government did not disdain to use the tripartite councils initiated during the dictatorship. But while these councils may have had the potential to be effective mechanisms for people’s participation, they suffered the tyranny of withheld information. To be truly effective, these councils need to share equally with private and non-government organizations all information about project assumptions and analyses.

The situation was compounded by the constraints imposed by the matter of foreign debt. In view of the profound effects of foreign debt transactions on the quality of the Filipino lives, it might be supposed that it was logical to be transparent. But sadly, logic did not prevail, and circumstances were not helped any by the refusal of multilateral debtor agencies themselves, like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, to make public their program analyses and loan conditions. In this manner the people were deprived of opportunities to participate in decisions to incur loans or to assist in monitoring compliance.

Government needs to be reminded: development is not something the government can do for the people but something people will have to do for themselves. The people have to be empowered, however, through deliberate and active sharing of information about the government menu of plans, transactions, and programs. In the interdependence of our life processes, sharing invariably tends to benefit the whole, whereas hoarding breeds subtle tyrannies.

Philippine Daily Inquirer 4 July 1989

calling out cheche

so what’s winston garcia of gsis up to, doing a mike defensor and doing it worse, harassing bullying persecuting no less than the veteran journalist cheche lazaro, who is highly esteemed, widely loved, and multi-awarded for the excellence and relevance of her body of work in broadcast journalism and nation-building?   and don’t tell me that winston garcia is not calling the shots here, because that’s simply not to be believed in the context of either the public teachers’ gsis pension plight or the war between garcia and the lopezes over meralco, or both.

cheche lazaro is right, she did not break the anti-wiretapping law.    she wasn’t a sammy ong or a vidal doble wire-tapping gma’s phone conversations with garci without gma’s and garci’s knowledge.    she was just cheche of probe interviewing a gsis pr lady on her cellphone for a show she was putting together, and yes she recorded the conversation, in the course of which she informed the gsis lady that it was being recorded, and the gsis lady did not stop talking, did not get off the line in protest, so what’s the crime.   the complaint shouldnot have prospered.   there is no wiretapping case.

what there is however is a breach of journalistic ethics.   when cheche aired a part of the recorded conversation without the gsis pr lady’s consent, cheche gave the lady reason to ask,what about my individual right to privacy?

Are the media allowed to violate the individual rights of a person? I was asking the court if the media could simply call you up, record your conversation, and broadcast it for the entire world to hear; all these, without your knowledge, much less, your permission.

…”I am a believer of the significant role journalists play in a democratic system. They are the watchmen, protecting us from wrongdoings taking place both in government and private sectors. But even journalists are not infallible. They can have their share of wrongdoings. And when journalists do wrong, how can we – especially private individuals – protect ourselves from them?”

the gsis pr lady gave cheche tacit approval to record, but not to disclose.   “hindi po lalabas…” and cheche agreed, “no, no…” yet she did put out a part of it, on the convoluted ground that the gsis pr lady had insisted that it be explained to viewers that gsis refused to grant an interview because of biased reporting by lopez-owned media entities.   cheche could simply have shown the official letter refusing the invitation to air the gsis side, she could have highlighted, even read out the pertinent parts, and the message would have been sent as effectively.

given her long history in the business, it surprises that cheche chose to publicize what was clearly off-the-record.   of course journalists hate off-the-record, it usually denies them the satisfaction of scooping a juicy story, but it’s a short-sighted view.    some of the biggest stories of corporate scandals, i am told, have been broken based on information that off-the-record statements led to.    there’s value, too, in something said that you can’t write or broadcast but which you can follow up in private and which might lead to you more info you would otherwise have missed out on.

the question is, why did cheche do it?   freedom of the press?   maybe she thought she could get away with it because the larger issue of gsis’s lack of transparency or the teachers’ well-being is more important than any government official’s privacy?   maybe she thought that off-the-record was an outdated ethic, it doesn’t promote nation-building?   maybe she thought that public opinion would be with her given the low satisfaction ratings of government and its institutions?  but says bong austero:

Lazaro is of course a pillar in broadcast journalism in this country with a sterling reputation both in academe and in media. I am a fan of Lazaro; I think very highly of her work … Being dismayed that someone of her caliber has to go through something like this is a natural gut reaction.

But if we really come to think about it, who Lazaro is and what she stands for is important and relevant but is not a foolproof defense and justification. I dread the idea that anyone who feels wronged cannot file a case against anyone on account of that other person’s reputation. I dread the idea that people likeLazaro is deemed untouchable because of who she is.

Moreover, I think it’s a disservice to automatically rile against the whole case, scream suppression of freedom of the press, and make reckless generalizations about how the case is yet another proof of sinister political machination of the powers-that-be without considering the intrinsic value of the case … the whole case is potentially just as much a chance to validate press freedom given the opportunity it offers to vindicate Lazaro’s cause as it is an opportunity to stress the right to privacy of individuals against the often invasive posturing of media.

and says the daily tribune:

The local media community appears to be divided on the issue on whether the Lazaro case is a case of press freedom or a case of a journalist having violated the rules of journalism, as even an instance of a journalist airing or publishing agreed off-the-record statements of his source is already a breach of journalistic ethics.

It will be recalled that veteran US broadcaster Connie Chung was booted out of the major network in the US a decade ago for having aired an off the record comment made by the mother of then Rep. Newt Gringgich that then First Lady Hilary Clinton was a bitch. This was not regarded as a case of press freedom, but a violation of the rules of journalism.

and says alex magno:

The mass media could be intrusive. It could so easily break into anyone’s privacy and brazenly trample on rights to privacy. There needs to be a finer consensus in the journalistic community over the conduct of interviews and the use of phone conversations, outside the formal setting of an interview, for airing.

On this concern, there is public merit in hearing out the arguments in the case filed against Cheche. Ordinary citizens, not only journalists, have rights too.

a qualified yes.    there is public merit in hearing out the arguments in the case of cheche but only on the question of journalistic ethics, NOT on the bogus and ridiculous wiretapping charges which should be dropped, the arrest order withdrawn, and the bail money returned.   in fairness lang naman.