• Journalism 2.0 – Is journalism different in the digital age?

• MYOB – Does it matter that we have surrendered our privacy to Google and social media sites?
• You Must Have Something to Hide – Where should we, as a society, should draw the line between public and private?
• Imagined Futures – Europe is in trouble. Can it be saved?

Look forward to seeing some of you there!

Newsnight reporter Allegra Stratton reported on the April 5th show (I’m looking for a link to this package) that the Government is planning to introduce fees for making Freedom of Information requests.

We’ve been here before (back in 2004/05) when the law was first introduced. No surprise that politicians who were once in favour of FOI when in opposition suddenly lose their appetite for the people’s right to know once in power. It usually takes about 12 months, so this government is doing well to last as long as it has.

I am of the opinion that it’s unlikely for these moves to succeed. We are still awaiting the report from Parliament’s post-judicial scrutiny on Freedom of Information. And do politicians and bureaucrats really want to come out against FOI at a time when cuts are being made and FOI has shown itself to be one of the most effective (and cost-effective) ways to cut waste, inefficiency and corruption? Making it harder for the citizens to get answers on how public money is spent is going to be a public relations disaster, so I hope sane heads prevail in Parliament.

Above, I am discussing the issue with Jonathan Baume, head of the First Division Association (FDA), the union for senior civil servants:

Don’t let the State spy on us by the back door
The Times, April 3, 2012

Proposed new laws would give powerful officials instant access to people’s internet data

It used to be that running a police state required a tremendous outlay of resources, from hiring watchers and informants to the central collection and storage of paper files. As we move our lives on to digital networks, we create a handy one-stop shop for the nosy official.

It is simple for governments to eavesdrop on our digital communications. They don’t have to store the data; they just go to where it’s collected – internet service providers (ISPs), social networks and telecoms companies. One simple step takes the State’s ability to spy on its citizens to a whole new level.

[We may hope our democratic principles would protect us from the sort of industrial internet surveillance practiced in China, Iran and other autocratic states. However, this government’s proposal revealed yesterday reveals a plan to rival China.]

Intelligence agents can already tap into our online communication and data where there are reasonable grounds for doing so. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), extended in 2003, allows not only the police, intelligence services and Revenue & Customs officials, but many other organisations, including local councils, to access telephone records, e-mail and internet activity.
That we have no idea how often they do it or for what purpose is an indication of the lack of supervision in this area.

There are three officials in charge: the commissioner for interceptions, the commissioner for the intelligence service and the chief surveillance commissioner. Privacy International has dubbed them the Three Blind Mice for the laxity of their reports and their failure to issue robust sanctions against improper or unauthorised snooping. They refuse to say how many national security intercepts are authorised on the laughable grounds that even to disclose this would be a danger to national security.

At present if UK officials want a user’s data from Google, they must make a legal application. In the first six months of last year, Google received requests for 1,444 users’ data, but only agreed to 63 per cent of them. Similarly, if agents want access to a Twitter user’s data they need to supply a court order to the American company. In a few cases, Twitter has challenged secret court orders so the user can challenge the request. Privacy researcher Chris Soghoian told me there are likely tens of thousands of secret 2703(d) orders made annually by the federal government under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The new legislation on data access to be announced in the Queen’s Speech would do away with all this. Instead it would require all ISPs and social networks to build a “back door” into their systems – effectively a portal through which the State can instantly access all user data. It allows snooping in real time.

Such a system was first proposed by the FBI in the 1990s when telephone companies were building digital systems. The companies opposed it for reasons of cost and design, but the Clinton Administration sweetened the pill with $500 million of public money and successfully lobbied Europe to follow suit. Because of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), all the world’s leading telecommunications companies now have interception “back doors” built in as standard.

Whether this has made us safer is debatable. But one proven consequence has been to provide intelligence services in Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, China and other autocratic states with a handy tool to monitor pro-democracy protesters and political opponents.

That was almost certainly not the FBI’s intention when looking for ways to catch criminals, but good intentions matter little when the result is a concentration of power. When this involves the more secretive arms of the State, such as the intelligence agencies, we should be particularly worried.

In the 1990s civil liberties campaigners joined forces with IT entrepreneurs to argue successfully that forcing interception technology on to the burgeoning internet industry would kill it. The Clinton Administration agreed.

However, almost as soon as the law was passed in 1994 the FBI and Department of Justice began lobbying to extend it. In 2005 they succeeded in adding broadband and VoIP (Voice over IP) providers. By 2011 their goal was to have surveillance back doors in all forms of internet communication, including Facebook, Google, peer-to-peer messaging services, and encrypted communications such as BlackBerry e-mail. Rather than setting an example for the world on citizens’ rights against the tyranny of the State, the US and UK governments appear to be taking their lead on internet policy from regimes such as China.

And there may be worse to come. In September 2013 the US National Security Agency will open a new mega spy agency. The purpose of the Utah Data Centre, as described by James Bamford in this month’s Wired magazine, will be to “intercept, decipher, analyse and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks”.

Surveillance must always be done within the constraints of laws protecting citizens’ rights. These exist for a very good reason – to act as a check on the considerable power of the State. We have plenty of evidence from elsewhere in the world of what happens when that disappears

Report Review
March 1, 2012, The House

‘The starting point for this inquiry, as already mentioned, has been that responsible investigative journalism should be protected and encouraged, given its important role in our democracy.’

I am glad to see these words in the Lords communications committee report, The Future of Investigative Journalism, published 16th February, but the reality is that the law, the costs, the lack of public records, and an elitist political structure, obstruct public interest investigative journalism.

When journalism was profitable, these costs could be borne. Now they cannot. By all means prosecute those who break the law, but the press needs support, not obstruction. The journalism of verification and truth is resource-intensive. The best way to encourage it is to lower the resources needed to do it.

Firstly, it must be made easier to conduct public interest investigations. It should not take five years of a person’s life to find out the most basic facts of how public officials spend the public’s money (MPs’ expenses). And here we find in the UK, the crucial ingredient necessary for responsible journalism missing: easily accessible public records. The most important of these are:

• Court records – including full court lists with full, real names (no abbreviations); all documents referenced in bundles, full judgement and sentencing (current and historical).
• Police records – incident reports and arrest bookings.
• Identification records (vehicle ownership records, reverse telephone directories, electoral registers).
• Regulatory inspections, complaints, violations, prosecutions
• Detailed ‘line-item’ budgets
• Land ownership
• Company registrations and accounts.

In the USA where I trained as a reporter, these records were the basic building blocks for all journalism: used for accurate identification, verification and investigation. Privilege attached to their content so that if I reported that X had been charged with fraud, I was protected from libel if I had quoted accurately from the police charge sheet or the court record.

In the UK, only the last two items are easily accessible. Reporters still have the same requirements, however, so they must get information elsewhere: hearsay, anonymous sources or illicitly obtained either for money or favour. This is not good for democracy. It would be better for these civically important records be available to all, regardless of favour or resources.

The second way to encourage public interest investigation is to reform the libel law. The committee rightly points out that ‘investigative journalism is especially resource-intensive, requires long-term investment with no guaranteed return, involves some risk of litigation’, but it understates the problem: ‘the working of the libel laws in the UK can, on occasion, have a discouraging effect on responsible investigative journalism…’ No, not on occasion – always.

Any journalist thinking about investigating the powerful (corporate or government) must be prepared for bankruptcy. Everyone I know who has written a non-fiction, current affairs book published in the UK (myself included) had to go through an expensive libel reading. The exact same books published in the USA do not have these costs. The committee praises the creation of the the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, yet one of the biggest obstacles it faced was finding reasonable libel insurance. This legal nightmare halts small or online cooperative journalism sites in their tracks. Helpmeinvestigate.com, for example, was hobbled because of the UK’s libel law.

We do not need more obstacles put in the way of investigative journalism. The net result will be to make it harder for journalists acting in the public interest. People like me will be priced out of the market. Instead, we will have ill-informed online propaganda and public relations circulated instantly across the globe.

http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/47677/?edition_id=991

Saturday-Sunday March 17-18 – Guardian Investigative Journalism Masterclass
Time: 10:00-5:00pm

Paul Lewis and I are back to teach journalists, lawyers, campaigners, authors and others the tricks of the investigative journalism trade. We’ve added a beefed up section on understanding company accounts and tracking assets as well as a section on keeping sources safe from online and other forms of surveillance. Our previous courses sold out quickly so if you want to attend sign up soon.

Location: Guardian offices, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU
Book a place or get more information

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Saturday 10 March 2012 – TEDxWarwick 2012
Time: 10:00am – 6:00pm

I’ll be speaking in the morning half of this all-day event at Warwick University. TEDx is a spin-off of the prestigious TED talks, a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. The theme of the conference is Global Challenges and I’ll be giving a talk entitled, ‘The beginning of the end of the free internet’.

Location: The Arts Centre’s Butterworth Hall
Book tickets & more information

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Thursday 08 March – Bath Literary Festival
Time: 6.15pm – 7.15pm
Everything is Digital

This is my second year at this book festival in the beautiful city of Bath. I’ll be talking about The Revolution Will Be Digitised, taking questions from the audience and signing books afterwards.
Location: Bath Guildhall
Book tickets & more information

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Date: Wednesday 29 February 2012 – LSE Literary Festival
Time: 6.30-8:00pm
Censorship in an Age of Freedom

I’ll be at the London School of Economics Literary Festival speaking on censorship with author Nick Cohen (You Can’t Read This Book) and director of POLIS Charlie Beckett. We’ll be talking about the censorship and secrecy that abounds in an age of information overload. With a multitude of online voices do we know more than before? Are we closer to the truth? Or are we becoming more susceptible to propaganda and spin?

Location: Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Book tickets & more information here
This event is now fully booked but there may be returns and I will certainly be happy to sign books afterwards.

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Wednesday 29 February 2012 – Open Justice
Time: 09:00am – 2:00pm
Justice Wide Open: Open justice in the digital age

I’ll be speaking at this Centre for Law, Justice & Journalism seminar. This is a free, half-day event accredited with 3 CPD points and will discuss issues around access to courts and judicial information in the 21st century. More information on the event here. The event is currently full but you can go on the waiting list.

Location: College Building, St John Street, London EC1V 0HB, UK

After 18 months, accused leaker gets a day in court
Index on Censorship, 16 Dec 2011

After nearly 18 months’ incarceration and punitive treatment described as “torture” by human rights activists, accused leaker and former US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning will finally get a day in court.

This is not a trial, but an “Article 32″ hearing, the US military equivalent to a civilian pre-trial hearing, where the defence can evaluate the government’s case and obtain facts through pre-trial discovery. It begins on 16 December at Fort Meade, Maryland and is expected to run right through the weekend for approximately five days. Despite press interest, only a small number of seats are available for the public and reporting restrictions are in place to prevent live coverage.

Saturday will mark Manning’s 24th birthday, the second birthday he has spent in custody since his arrest in May 2010 for allegedly leaking a US Army video that showed soldiers gunning down Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists. He was later charged with 22 violations of military law for allegedly leaking records and transmitting defence information. He faces life in prison if convicted. The hearing will determine whether or not he goes ahead for a full court-martial.

The length of time Manning has been in pre-trial confinement is controversial, but more so has been his treatment while confined — seeming more like punishment than justice. While in the military brig in Quantico, Virginia he was in maximum custody and controversially placed on prevention of injury (POI) watch, which meant he was in solitary confinement, forced to spend 23 hours in a cell six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

His lawyer David Coombs reported Manning was woken at 5am weekdays and 7am on weekends and was not allowed to sleep any time between then and 8pm. If he attempted to sleep during those hours, he was made to sit up or stand by the guards. Guards checked on him every five minutes by asking him if he was okay. He had to surrender his clothes at night apart from boxer shorts. He was not allowed a pillow or sheets, nor any personal items in his cell, and was prevented from exercising apart from one hour when he would walk in a figure of eight motion.

The harsh conditions were denounced by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and brought the attention of the United Nations’ rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez, who tried to visit Manning but was refused a private and confidential meeting with the prisoner. More than 50 members of the European Parliament signed a letter to the US government expressing their concern over the whistleblower’s treatment in custody, and 250 American legal scholars signed a letter to President Obama protesting that Manning’s “degrading and inhumane conditions” were illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

It was the sort of treatment one might expect from third-world or despotic countries, not the supposed leader of the free world purporting to set an example on human rights. Even the former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley broke ranks and said the treatment was “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid”.

Following these worldwide criticisms, Manning was moved to a facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where his conditions were said to be better. The US military conducted an internal investigation into the alleged mistreatment at Quantico and found he had been improperly placed on “prevention of injury” watch against the recommendations of qualified medical personnel. However, the prison official implicated by the report was able to overturn it.

Manning’s “guilt” so far has been based on chat logs of dubious prominence: conversations he allegedly had with hacker Adrian Lamo between 21-25 May. In these logs he”‘confesses” to leaking the video and US Army records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 260,000 State Department cables and personal files of Guantanamo prisoners to whistleblowing site Wikileaks. The logs also provide a motive: not spying or stealing for material gain, but a desire to educate the world’s citizens about what governments do in their name.

Manning’s story reads like a betrayal by all sides. Not just by those he thought he could confide in but by a government supposedly committed to human rights.

By its punitive pre-trial treatment of Manning and the extra-judicial attempts to shut down Wikileaks, the US Government has renounced the moral highground. It had a unique opportunity to show by action rather than rhetoric how best to practice due process, the rule of law, human rights and freedom of expression. How sadly it has failed to live up to the values it preaches.

Secret orders forcing Google and Sonic to release a WikiLeaks volunteer’s email reveal the scale of US government snooping

Somewhere, a US government official is reading through a list of those who sent or received an email from Jacob Appelbaum, a 28-year-old computer science researcher at the University of Washington who volunteered for WikiLeaks. Among those listed will be my name, a journalist who interviewed Appelbaum for a book about the digital revolution.

Appelbaum is a spokesman for Tor, a free internet anonymising software that helps people defend themselves against internet surveillance. He’s spent five years teaching activists around the world how to install and use the service to avoid being monitored by repressive governments. It’s exactly the sort of technology Secretary of State Hilary Clinton praised in her famous “Internet Freedom” speech in January 2010, when she promised US government support for the designers of technology that circumvented blocks or firewalls. Now, Appelbaum finds himself a target of his own government as a result of his friendship with Julian Assange and the fact WikiLeaks used the Tor software.

Appelbaum has not been charged with any wrongdoing; nor has the government shown probable cause that he is guilty of any criminal offence.

That matters not a jot, because, as the law stands, government officials don’t need a search warrant to access our digital data. Searching someone’s home requires a warrant that can only be obtained by proving probable cause, but digital searches require no such burden of proof. Instead, officials essentially “self-certify” to a judge that the information they seek is, in their opinion, relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. On this basis, Google and a small ISP called Sonic were made to hand over to the government all Appelbaum’s email headers from the past two years.

Most people are not aware of the ease with which governments – free, open and so-called democratic – can access and peruse our private communications. This is because these court orders are commonly sealed. What is uncommon is for internet service providers to request the orders be unsealed so they can inform their customers, as Sonic and Google did in Appelbaum’s case.

Privacy researcher Chris Soghoian estimates there are likely tens of thousands of these 2703(d) orders made annually by the federal government under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. He bases this on the number of pen registers granted to the federal government annually: 12,000. These allow officials to intercept telephone and internet meta-data in real time.

“There’s far more data to be had after the fact, so probably these 2703(d) orders are even more common,” Soghoian says.

The fourth amendment of the US Constitution should protect against unwarranted search and seizure. Its inclusion in the Bill of Rights was a result of colonialists’ anger at abuse suffered at the hands of British officials using writs of assistance. Writs were general warrants issued by the British Parliament to allow customs officials to search for smuggled goods, but in the American colonies, they were used by agents of the British state to interrogate people and raid their homes on the pretext of searching and seizing any “prohibited and uncustomed goods”, which often meant “seditious” publications that criticised government policies or the King.

The colony of Massachusetts banned these general warrants in 1756 and when the governor overturned the ban, it was one of the sparks for the American Revolution. It’s ironic then to see how, under the guise of “patriotism”, these court orders have stripped away fourth amendment protections and granted to US officials the same unlimited powers of search and seizure that so aggravated the American revolutionaries.

Today, the privacy law surrounding our emails is woefully outdated, as it is based on the technology of the first email services of the 1980s. Back then, people dialled up their provider to download email onto their home computer. Mail left for over 180 days was considered in storage, so was not subject to the wiretap protections which were for information in transmission. This means email older than 180 days doesn’t require a warrant whereas anything newer does. Now, with cloud services and extensive storage available through services such as Gmail, our primary archive of email is held more or less indefinitely. Ironically, this means the most important or sensitive emails receive the lowest legal protections. (The law is also weighted to protect unread mail over read mail so, strangely, spam that remains unopened because it goes straight to your junk folder has more privacy protections than read mail in your archives.)

Few citizens of the world will be adequately clued up on US surveillance laws, yet information stored on Facebook, Twitter, Google or any other American companies is subject to them. Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn’t it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?

Listen here.

The press will die if it fails in its duty to serve the public interest
The Times, 27 September 2011

The ethics of what should or shouldn’t be published can be distilled down to a simple rule: is it in the public interest? Put simply, the public interest is not the tittle-tattle that interests the public but anything that informs and enlightens society.

The pursuit of this high-minded ideal is not exclusive to reporters: a lot of academic and scientific research fits that bill. But journalism is different because as a rough trade it deals with the ugly realities of human nature: sex, scandal, crime, corruption – all the emotional vagaries that make up the “crooked timber of humanity”. It’s not about peddling pretty pictures; that’s public relations or propaganda. Because of those ugly realities journalists have to use subterfuge or deception to dig out the truth. Where activity is not in the public interest and criminal then let it be prosecuted, but we should be wary of prosecuting speech or regulating the press.

First, it is impractical to introduce national regulations on the press as information now flows globally. What people can’t read in the newspaper they will get from Twitter, which, as a US company, is governed by the more tolerant First Amendment.

Second, we should note that the greatest abuses in history were never a result of too much speech but rather too little. It is only through free speech that we have any hope of tackling the real enemy of the people: the concentration of power.

Where speech is false, then the best way to tackle it is with more, not less, speech. Jemima Khan showed this when she put paid to rumours that she had sought a superinjunction not by bringing a court case against Twitter, but by tweeting the truth herself. Public figures may be more accountable in the internet age but they equally have more opportunity to get out their side of the story.

Journalists, too, have come under more scrutiny than ever before, thanks to the internet.

Rather than a race to the bottom, this explosion of speech creates a renewed need for public interest journalism. In the age of information overload, when everyone can tweet or blog, how can we know what is important or true? We look to reputation.

Journalists are, or ought to be, the public’s hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distilit to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It’s also the reason why anyone would choose a well-known newspaper’s website over an unknown blog.

The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its one unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.

Wednesday 28 September – 6pm-7pm – Chatham House
People, Politics & Power: How Digitization is Changing Our World

Richard Sambrooke (former director of BBC News and BBC World Service) will chair this event at Chatham House. Suddenly a seemingly powerless individual can, through interactive global networks, effectively challenge powerful individuals and institutions. The speaker, an award-winning writer, journalist and freedom of information activist, will argue that those in the establishment may see this new empowerment of individuals as dangerous and destabilizing, and as a threat to national security, believing in consequence that the internet must be controlled. Others view this phenomenon as providing a gateway to a transformed political arena. The speaker will contend that the greater danger to humanity is not free speech but the concentration of power.
Book tickets and more info here.

The WikiLeaks ‘hero’ is actually morally bankrupt
The Times, 23 September 2011

One question I’m often asked about my long investigation into MPs’ expenses is whether I was ever threatened with retribution. The answer is no. The closest I came was John Prescott getting snarly on Newsnight and an angry letter from a former MP staffer.

Strangely enough, it was investigating Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks frontman, for a book about the digital revolution that put me in the crosshairs of an angry online mob. At first I was impressed by this seeming warrior for transparency, democracy and accountability. In his “unauthorised autobiography”, published this week, we hear the old war stories of his early hacking days when he used the handle Mendax, from Horace’s Splendide Mendax – nobly untruthful. Yet I came to discover there was little that was noble about Assange’s mendacity.

He may have started WikiLeaks with the best of intentions, but to lead a campaign for openness while acting like an authoritarian patriarch with little respect for the truth does not bode well.

He looked upon WikiLeaks donations in the same way some politicians look upon the taxpayer, as a funding source for personal needs. This first became apparent after he was accused of sexual assault by two women in Sweden and he tried to use donations to fund his personal legal defence. Other WikiLeaks volunteers opposed this, and for this they were deemed traitors. Assange’s method throughout has been to conflate the cause with the man and by so doing try to make himself above question.

In his world, those who challenge him for his dubious behaviour aren’t holding him to account but part of a dark conspiracy. I witnessed many Wikileaks volunteers who dared question Assange, denounced by him as either stooges of intelligence agencies or spurned lovers (men or women, it didn’t matter). Online whispering campaigns would start up seeding these ideas. People who gave Assange their time and money would find themselves suddenly sidelined and briefed against for daring to question an immoral action by the founder. Long before Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote his book, Assange was telling people that his former partner was a paranoid schizophrenic and an intelligence agent. When Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir voiced her disapproval of Assange’s decision to publish informers’ names in the Afghan war logs, he told reporters it was because ‘she’s in love with me’. It was the same with all those who worked with Assange whether at the Guardian, New York Times, Norway’s Aftenposten or most recently Canongate. What could never be countenanced was that Assange was responsible by his own actions.

When I got hold of the full set of US diplomatic cables, I discovered first-hand Assange’s capacity for dissembling, spin, threats and blatant untruths*. While Assange showed bravery, the way the Afghan logs were published with informers’ names left in was ethically irresponsible. He claimed I’d obtained the leak of his leaks through “criminal deception”, which was an utter untruth*. He told another reporter that he “knew where I lived” and the insinuation was that I’d better watch out. He threatened to sue me for depriving him of his “financial assets” (no writ yet). I heard from hacker friends that he’d been smearing my reputation, and his tiny army of cultish Assangistas launched a hate campaign online.

These people wanted their hero and they could not countenance the truth: that the man they’d chosen as their saviour was morally bankrupt. His fight for freedom of information wasn’t based on any moral principle but rather from a barely understood psychological compulsion.

So I, for one, want to separate the man from the cause. If one is going to be a campaigner for truth then telling it occasionally wouldn’t go amiss.

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* Due to English libel law, newspapers in the UK are loathe to ever use the word ‘lie’ and so you will see that ‘lies’ and ‘utter lie’ are published as ‘untruths’ and ‘utterly untrue’. These two words may seem indistinguishable to the reader but in English libel law they matter. A lie is: to speak untruthfully with intent to mislead or deceive whereas an untruth is: the state or quality of being untrue; a statement or fact that is untrue. The key difference is that a lie is an untruth told with deliberate intent to mislead. In this article, ‘lie’ is actually more accurate. However, English libel law is one of the most restrictive of free speech in the world. It puts the burden of guilt on the defendant (the writer) who is presumed guilty and must prove innocence. It is for this reason that England is favoured by the rich and powerful as the place to bring libel actions as a means to stifle and suppress criticism. Assange was initially a great campaigner against England’s libel law, at least until he became powerful and then began threatening libel actions of his own against those who criticised him.

Police questioning of journalists such as the Guardian’s Amelia Hill who seek to uncover corruption is a worrying trend

The questioning under caution of the Guardian reporter Amelia Hill by the Metropolitan police is part of a worrying trend: for the police appear to be using their power not to root out corruption or bribery, but to stop a reporter doing her job, namely to winkle out the truth about an issue of public importance.

Hill reported a number of stories about the phone-hacking scandal, including the revelation of Milly Dowler’s phone being hacked by News of the World. It was this story that finally compelled police and politicians to fully investigate a scandal that some had known about for years. Commentators have seen Hill’s questioning as part of a wider attempt to criminalise contact between journalists and off-the-record sources.

But there is nothing unusual about police and reporters hanging out together. In the old days of crime reporting this was commonplace and it was not unduly difficult to strike a balance between keeping the public informed without endangering investigations. But in the age of public relations and spin, such free conversations are looked upon by the authorities as highly dangerous – not to policing so much as to those in power. Such free conversations might lead to challenging questions.

The danger with a centralised police PR operation is that information is used not to benefit the public but to benefit those in power, often to the detriment of the public. It is for this reason that officers “leak”, because they want to solve their cases and they know they can only do so with the help and co-operation of the public.

The situation Hill has apparently been questioned about calls to mind two recent cases. Philip Balmforth was a former police inspector and vulnerable persons officer responsible for Asian women in the Bradford area of West Yorkshire. He was praised in a House of Commons early day motion signed by 56 MPs in March 2008 for being a “knight in shining armour” who “does everything he can to protect people and give them time to assess the situation they are in”. Yet a week after he was praised in parliament he was facing a disciplinary hearing for “damaging the reputation” of West Yorkshire police, all because he spoke directly to a journalist.

“I had a speech ready for every journalist – after being told the publicity had to stop,” Balmforth told me. “The speech was: ‘You must contact the press office.’ But many in the media would ask for ‘off the record’ background to the problem, which I would willingly give, subject to contacting the press office before using it (who would always refuse).

Balmforth spoke out in the Times challenging the official figure given by the government’s forced marriage unit that there were 300 cases of forced marriage annually, saying he dealt with that many in West Yorkshire alone.

We should be grateful to Balmforth for alerting us to the problem of forced marriage. Instead he was stripped of his position by the police force. He has now retired.

Another police officer who dared to question one force’s use of covert surveillance was himself put under surveillance and his friend Sally Murrer, a journalist at the Milton Keynes Citizen, was arrested and threatened with life in prison.

Mark Kearney was once a Thames Valley police detective, a covert surveillance and intelligence officer. In 2007, Kearney was working as part of a secret intelligence unit at Woodhill prison near Milton Keynes, which bugged inmates’ telephones and their visits. When a supervising officer from a police force wanted someone bugged, they had to go to Kearney. He didn’t have authority to deny these requests but he was becoming uncomfortable with their frequency. And it wasn’t just prisoners that were bugged – it was their visitors, too. One of those visitors happened to be an MP, Sadiq Khan. Kearney spoke out internally against this surveillance.

It was around this time that Thames Valley police’s professional standards department and Hertfordshire police opened Operation Plaid, an investigation to find out whether information was being passed to journalists. Officers began intercepting all Kearney’s and Murrer’s phone calls and text messages. After two months’ of surveillance, they arrested Kearney and charged him with eight counts of willful misconduct in a public office.

Murrer had eight police officers at her house and four more searched the local newspaper office. They took her notebooks, computers, phone and contacts book.

“I was absolutely convinced I would go to prison,” Murrer told me. “The ferocity of the investigation was unbelievable. They won’t stop until they get me, I thought. They told me I’d go to prison for life.”

Police accused Sally of obtaining confidential information from Kearney and then selling it to the national press. They charged her with three counts of the ancient common law offence of aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office.

Reading the official transcript from her police interview, which was used as evidence against her, it could appear that Mark told Sally something confidential. But when Sally’s lawyers listened to all the tapes, they discovered large sections of Sally’s rebuttals omitted. The police can’t alter the time code on tapes so they accounted for the missing sections by saying the tape was inaudible or had a fault.

“Once we got hold of those tapes and played them back we discovered they were perfectly intelligible,” Murrer said. “We half wanted to go to trial. It would have exposed so many things that were wrong with the police.”

The charges made against Kearney and Murrer were thrown out when Judge Southwell ruled the evidence inadmissible in court because the police had not followed proper procedure in relation to a journalist’s right to carry out his or her job. That was 18 months and £1m later.

In the absence of competition, it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability of the police can exist. It was not the police who uncovered corruption and abuse in relation to the phone-hacking scandal. It was journalists. Now those journalists appear to be criminalised for conducting the best kind of journalism: finding out the truth about issues of national public importance.

This week I received an email from the Guardian’s Reader Editor seeking clarification for the opinion piece I wrote about the reluctance by some universities to disclose underlying research in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. They’d had a complaint – not from Stirling University, the subject of the piece, but from the University of East Anglia which occupied a whole ONE SENTENCE of my article. The offending section reads thus:

This is not the first time a university has tried to hide from FoI. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests by climate change sceptics (the university escaped prosecution because the case came to light outside the six-month time limit for cases to be brought).

For those who don’t recall, the University of East Anglia got into trouble when someone hacked into its server and leaked a number of documents, detailed data and private e-mails exchanged between climate scientists to the public. The emails gave the impression the University was not exactly keen on the public’s right to know and was actively breaching access to information laws by suppressing or destroying information subject to requests.

One email from Professor Phil Jones, then the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) stated: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”, and another email in which he had written “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”.

Most of the hand-wringing by the university seemed to focus on the leak itself rather than on the disturbing content which showed officials actively trying to evade their FOI responsibilities. The Information Commissioner was called in to investigate and found primie facie evidence that the access laws had been breached. However, the ICO was never able to make a formal finding or complete its investigation because it discovered a loophole in the law that tied its hands. While it is a criminal offence to alter, destroy or suppress information subject to FOI requests, the statute of limitations on this crime is a measly SIX MONTHS. For this reason alone, the ICO could not proceed. Instead they did what they could and issued a decision notice on the breaches of other aspects of the Environmental Information Regulations (the FOI equivalent for environmental info). The Notice also refers to the criminal offences:

The emails suggested that some requests for information were considered an imposition, that attempts to circumvent the legislation were considered and that the ethos of openness and transparency the legislation seeks to promote were not universally accepted. This is of considerable concern to the Commissioner and in keeping with his duty to promote observance of the legislation he will now consider whether further action is appropriate to secure future compliance.

The complainant made an allegation that an offence under regulation 19 of the EIR had been committed. Although the emails referred to above indicated prime facie evidence of an offence, the Commissioner was unable to investigate because six months had passed since the potential offence was committed, a constraint placed on the legislation by the Magistrates Court Act 1980.

Since then the ICO have ruled that UEA must disclose certain climate data by UEA and they have now complied. UEA also had to sign this undertaking.

And finally there were a number of enquiries: the Muir Russell Report and various reports of the Science and Technology Select Committee which exonerated most of the important people. Here’s how another article in the Guardian described the findings of the Russell Report:

…the inquiry conducted detailed analysis of only three cases of potential abuse of peer review. And it investigated only two instances where allegations were made that CRU scientists such as director Phil Jones and deputy director Keith Briffa misused their positions as IPCC authors to sideline criticism. On the issue of peer review and the IPCC, it found that “the allegations cannot be upheld”, but made clear this was partly because the roles of CRU scientists and others could not be distinguished from those of colleagues. There was “team responsibility”.

The report is far from being a whitewash. And nor does it justify the claim of university vice-chancellor Sir Edward Action that it is a “complete exoneration”. In particular it backs critics who see in the emails a widespread effort to suppress public knowledge about their activities and to sideline bloggers who want to access their data and do their own analysis.

Most seriously, it finds “evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them [under Freedom of information law]“. Yet, extraordinarily, it emerged during questioning that Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.

Secrecy was the order of the day at CRU. “We find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness,” says the report. That criticism applied not just to Jones and his team at CRU. It applied equally to the university itself, which may have been embarrassed to find itself in the dock as much as the scientists on whom it asked Russell to sit in judgment.

The university “failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory requirements” – FOI law in particular – and “also the risk to the reputation of the university and indeed the credibility of UK climate science” from the affair.

The university has responded by abolishing the role of director of CRU, held by Jones until last November. Indeed CRU itself has lost its former independence. Acton said Jones would now be “director of research” for CRU, working within the university environment department.

Knowing all this you can imagine my amazement at the sheer gall of UEA to then demand this correction:

Original Message
—————-
Subject: Heather Brookes on Freedom of Information

Dear Chris,
Heather Brooke’s opinion piece: “Freedom of information is for businesses too” (2 September 2010) perpetuates the myth that the University of East Anglia has breached the Freedom of Information Act.

She bases her assertion on a previous Guardian piece which we wrote asking you to correct.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has confirmed that it has not investigated whether section 77 of the act had actually been breached – ie whether the university had broken the law. As a point of detail, we also pointed out that the case in question related to emails and not to climate data as mentioned in the article of 28 January 2010.

I hope you can correct this.
Regards, Annie
—————————————————–

University of East Anglia

Is scientific research endangered by Philip Morris’s freedom of information request? Not when we all benefit

A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International to the University of Stirling has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research.

The UK’s FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public’s name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.

Some universities, however, are balking. Stirling is one of nine universities that form the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, and is the premier research institute for investigating smoking behaviour. It receives funding from the Department of Health and its findings are used to formulate anti-smoking laws. So it’s probably no surprise that Philip Morris is interested in its data. The tobacco company made its first FoI request anonymously through the London law firm Clifford Chance in September 2009. It put in a further two FoI requests in its own name: all seeking underlying data and methodology for the centre’s report, which was called “Point of Sale Display of Tobacco Products”. In particular, it sought information from a survey entitled “Cancer Research UK CTCR survey of adolescents’ reactions to tobacco marketing” which was referred to in the introduction to the report.

The university provided some data but refused the bulk by claiming the requester was time-wasting. It would have been better off dealing with the request openly and using those exemptions in the FoI law which protect privacy or expending excessive resources. Instead, its appeal to the Scottish information commissioner was rejected. This is not the first time a university has tried to hide from FoI. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act when handling requests by climate change sceptics (the university escaped prosecution because the case came to light outside the six-month time limit for cases to be brought).

Other universities claim researchers will feel inhibited or endangered if forced to reveal their methodology or primary data. This strikes me as unlikely. The arguments reveal a discomfort with the higher level of accountability that exists in the digital age. There are plenty of exemptions in the FoI law for genuine issues of cost, privacy and confidentiality. Stirling’s attempt to refuse the request, calling it “vexatious”, smacks of fear. The research in question is funded with public money and conducted in the public’s name. These reports often go on to become cornerstones in creating new legislation, so we should be allowed to interrogate the underlying facts.

Several FoI officers complain it’s unfair to the taxpayer to provide such data to a rich company like Philip Morris. Indeed there may well be concerns about what Philip Morris will do with the data, but if it’s available to all then we can see for ourselves if any attempt is made to “spin” it.

In the US, businesses are one of the biggest users of FoI and new industries are built on this universal access to official data. The ability to use and re-use official government data is a factor behind the remarkable growth of the US knowledge economy. The satellite navigation industry grew out of free GPS data obtained from the US government.

There’s a unique anti-business attitude in Europe in relation to FoI. Prof James Boyle of Duke University Law School told me: “European attitudes towards private commercialisation actually work against the idea of openness. In the US if the government hands out weather data for free and people make a ton of money off the back of it, everyone says, ‘Great! it’s good for the economy, good for us, good for the company’ … In Britain there’s a sense that the company has got something for free and now they’re making money out of it. ‘How terrible! They’re free-riding.’ They don’t see the overall economic benefit that comes from sharing information.”

I’m in favour of businesses using FoI. Not simply because business people are members of the public but because once businesses – with their bigger budgets and legal departments – start using FoI, we might see the law have some real bite.

Inside the secret world of hackers
Guardian, 25 August 2011
By Heather Brooke

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II tried to suppress them for being “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”. It was in the coffee houses that information previously held in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th century, when English public life was transformed.

Hackerspaces could prove to be as important for reform in the digital age. While collectives of rogue hackers such as Anonymous and Lulzsec have grabbed headlines with their mischievous hacks of personal information from Sony, News International and governments, hackerspaces have quietly focused on creating alternatives to the things they see wrong in society: secretive government, unfettered corporate power, invasion of privacy. Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking files to WikiLeaks, attended the launch of BUILDS, a hackerspace at Boston University last year. In Sweden the hacker collective Telecomix has been involved in keeping lines of communication open in middle eastern countries when political leaders shut down networks.

As part of the research for my book, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, I travelled to Berlin to meet the group of hackers known as the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The Club was so named not because it set out to cause chaos but rather because one of the founders, Wau Holland, felt chaos theory offered the best explanation for how the world actually worked. Dutch hacker and entrepreneur Rop Gonggrijp says the club is about “adapting to a world which is (and always has been) much more chaotic and non-deterministic than is often believed”.

In Berlin, just after Christmas last year, more than 2,000 hackers and information activists gathered at the CCC’s annual conference to discuss technology and the future. Gonggrijp gave the keynote speech, which was startlingly prescient in light of subsequent uprisings, revolutions and riots. “Most of today’s politicians realise that nobody in their ministries, or any of their expensive consultants, can tell them what is going on any more. They have a steering wheel in their hands without a clue what – if anything – it is connected to. Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats.”

The hacker community may be small but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future. So what is a hacker? Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving. It’s much easier to attack than to defend a system, so the best hackers are those who build things. The ones who break them are known as “crackers”. The world wide web, and free software operating systems such as the GNU Project and the Linux kernel, could all be considered hacker creations. Even Facebook began as a hack. That is not to say hackers don’t attack systems and take things apart. They do, with a compulsive glee, and the more adolescent hackers use their skills as much to show off to each other and rebel against authority than for any greater good. There are good hackers and bad hackers. Some of the best hackers say the line between hacker/cracker or white hat/black hat (ie, good/bad) is of little relevance. Some are amoral, interested only in the intellectual challenge, while others think the ethics behind hacking are all-important. A hacker could use his skill to protect a system he knows is used to track down and kill protesters. He’s not “cracking” but how can he be considered a white-hat hacker? The ethics of hacking, like life, are slightly more complicated than a 1950s western movie.

Some who have hacking skills want nothing to do with a community they see as comprised of “alpha geeks” – macho, misogynistic thugs and vandals. “A lot of them are just selfish teenage assholes,” says Benjamin Mako Hill, a student at MIT’s media lab specialising in sociology and online communities. “Most grow out of it, others go on to do computer security.” Certainly that is the impression one gets from reading the chat logs of some Anonymous members. Even within the hacker scene there are divisions. An older hacker known as Virus recently described the younger hackers of Anonymous as “nothing but a bunch of fat, pimply basement dwelling losers who masturbate 3+ times a day”.

If Anonymous and Lulzsec are the id of hacking, then physical hackerspaces are the heart of the higher-minded hacking ideals: freedom of information, meritocracy of ideas, a joy of learning and anti-authoritarianism. The CCC is Europe’s largest hacker organisation and also one of the oldest worldwide, having been set up in 1981 by Wau Holland and others who predicted the rising importance digital technology would have in people’s lives. CCC’s hackers are often older and run their own businesses. They hold conferences and even consult with the German government. The CCC is famous for exposing the security flaws of major technologies, from chip and PIN to smartphones. Want to know how to listen in on GSM mobile phone traffic? Here’s the place to learn (within legal constraints, of course). Among some of their more noteworthy “hacks” is pulling the fingerprints of the German interior minister from a water glass and putting them on a transparent film that could be used to fool fingerprint readers. The Club also worked with activists for voting transparency to expose flaws in computerised voting machines. These were later ruled unconstitutional in Germany and abolished in Holland.

The CCC isn’t just about technical hacking, it is a hub of political activism based around a few common goals: transparency of governments, privacy for private people and the removal of excessive restrictions on sharing information. Many of these hacks are demonstrated at the annual conference at the Berlin Congress Centre, and it was here that Julian Assange presented WikiLeaks to an enthusiastic crowd in 2008.

The CCC has its own permanent base on Marienstraße in Berlin. It’s not a secret and you’ll find “Chaos Computer Club” listed on the bell push of the neo-classical building. You pass through a stone walkway to an inner courtyard and on the far right side is the entrance to the CCC. Inside, there’s a collection of desks pushed together, well-worn office chairs and sofas and coils of wires strewn across most surfaces. Crates of Club-Mate, a soft drink beloved by hackers for its high caffeine content, are piled at the back and dispensed from a defaced Coke machine. Someone has drawn a noughts and crosses board in the dusty screen of an old video game, Ideal Twinline, and underneath, the words, “How about a nice game of chess?” There are posters on the walls: “Liberty waits on your fingers” and “Keep on blogging”.

Hackerspaces aren’t just about hacking with computers. The ideals can be applied to every aspect of life including politics – which is considered just another “system” by which humans live together. Like any other system, it can therefore be hacked and these spaces offer a real-time experiment in political hacking. They often contain power tools, industrial cutting machines, sewing machines and sometimes even kitchens for “culinary hacking”. At the tiny hackerspace HACK (the Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge) in Budapest, members have built an electronic plantwatering system, and at Sprout in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I saw an MIT student building a jet propeller. In large spaces such as Noisebridge in San Francisco members have created an active space-exploration programme sending weather-balloon probes up to 70,000ft in the sky to collect images and data using GPS smartphones and digital cameras. Access to and membership of the spaces is usually governed by commonly agreed norms, but notably there is a lack of formal rules. Asking permission is frowned upon as it implies a power imbalance. The chosen way is to observe the culture and then seek agreement.

“What we’ve done at Noisebridge is not to say how bad everything is but to create a viable alternative,” says Jacob Appelbaum, one of its founders. “I wanted a space where we could make things come true. Almost like a magical environment where we could decide one day we wanted to have a space programme and then … we did. That’s not going to happen in a cafe. There currently isn’t a public place where you can have a lathe or a table saw or computer access or couches where you can sit, where no one feels entitled to throw you out. The closest thing is the university lab where I work now but there we’re beholden to university administrators. In this place we are beholden to no one but ourselves.”

I caught up with Appelbaum in Seattle, where he’s now a staff research scientist at the University of Washington. He explained that the political ideology of the hackerspace is probably nearest to libertarian, “in the liberty sense”. Anyone who wants to contribute something, whether time, money or ideas, is welcome. The ability to do things is dependent on being accepted by the group, and that comes when one’s actions have merit. Appelbaum says that Noisebridge is run along anarchist principles of mutual aid, solidarity and respect. He is keen to stress that this is not anarchy in the sense of chaos but as author Emma Goldman describes it: the liberation of the human mind from religion, property and government, “a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth”.

The group makes decisions based on consensus. “It can take a while,” he admits, but the advantages outweigh the costs. “In our society people don’t have a lot of agency to change things. And when I say ‘our society’ I mean ‘the world’. Sometimes in our discussions it will be the first time that someone has ever felt listened to in their entire lives. That’s actually incredibly sad but I’m happy we can give them that opportunity. I think there are a lot of us who don’t think the world is as we would like to see it. And anyone who is not a utopianist is a schmuck.”

Even in the world of hackers and web revolutionaries, Appelbaum’s dedication to the internet is startling (it is “the only reason I’m alive today”, he once told Rolling Stone magazine). He found in computers an escape from a chaotic upbringing and credits his skill in technology for moving him out of America’s underclass and into the middle class. As well as working at the university he is also a spokesman for Tor, a free internet-anonymising software that helps people defend themselves against surveillance, and he is spent five years teaching activists how to install and use the service to avoid being monitored by repressive governments. Now he himself is frequently targeted by the US government as a result of his relationship with WikiLeaks, which used Tor software.

Sometimes, though, hackers don’t realise they are no longer outsiders but have their hands on the levers of power. Tech writer Danny O’Brien points to Bill Gates, who continued to believe right up until the anti-trust lawsuits of the 1990s that Microsoft would be destroyed by big powerful companies such as IBM – despite the fact that he was, by then, one of the world’s richest men and Microsoft the world’s biggest IT company. Furthermore, it can prove difficult to reconcile the subversive hacker mindset with the demands of running a multinational firm. A robust disregard for intellectual property in youth, for example, is often replaced with a cadre of lawyers enforcing draconian copyright law once the requisite information has been hacked, the product built and the company made profitable.

O’Brien is himself an embodiment of the transformation. This once-shabby Londoner, who wrote a tech newsletter called Need To Know, meets me in a swish cocktail bar in Palo Alto, California. “When we wrote [NTK] originally, geeks were under-represented; an unconnected group of outsiders who were excited about technology. But now the story is how much ridiculous power we have and how we’re misusing that power or unaware of it.”

Here you’ll find some of the background material used in the writing of the book such as audio recordings and transcripts of interviews, photographs, etc.

Enjoy!

As the news agenda goes into warp speed, it becomes ever more difficult for authors writing about current events to keep their books timely and relevant. Seismic events race by at almost weekly intervals: phone hacking gives way to the Norwegian terror atrocity, which is replaced by stories about the London riots and the world in economic meltdown.

The hyper acceleration of news is a result of the digital age in which we now live. No sooner will an author begin a book then the story will begin to mutate before her very eyes. This happened to me while I was working on “The Revolution Will Be Digitised,” which will be published in the UK on August 18th. When I began my research for this book in February 2010, few had heard of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The speed with which WikiLeaks went from niche interest to global prominence was a real-time example of the revolutionizing power of the digital age in which information can spread instantly across the globe through networked individuals.

But how can an author of current affairs keep up with such a fast-changing landscape? Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three. In these months, everything can change. To try and get on top of the news agenda, publishers can pull forward the publication date but they still require at least six weeks from the date the book comes off the presses to the date it is in book shops. In only a few exceptional circumstances can this time be reduced.

The digitization of information has revolutionized all sorts of industries from music and movies to shopping and finance. It has fundamentally changed the media landscape, so why not publishing? It seemed appropriate that as the author of a book about the digital revolution, I should look into publishing in new digital formats, so when RosettaBooks’ CEO Arthur Klebanoff pitched the idea of a Kindle Single, I was intrigued. He wanted to take the narrative section of the book and edit it into a 24,000-word, stand-alone piece. Unlike traditional publishing where the author is advanced funds from prospective royalties, digital deals are done without an advance but with a higher percentage of royalties going to the writer. We agreed to try out this new digital experiment.

The real surprise was the speed with which it all happened. In less than two weeks from the time Mr. Klebanoff and I spoke, “Assange Agonistes” was proofed, laid out and available to download on Kindle. Of course, the timely work of writing and editing had taken place with the help of a traditional publisher but for a timely news story, I can’t see how a writer of current affairs could beat the efficiency of e-publishing. It will certainly be my first port of call for future investigations.

The book trade may be in transition, but it is far from dead. Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things whether that’s in publishing or politics. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.