CRUEL BRITANNIA INVITE (pdf))

How a cyberwar was spun by shoddy journalism
The Guardian, Friday 29 March 2013

Journalistic scepticism was lacking when stories about a DDoS attack ‘breaking’ the internet surfaced. This is a real future risk

‘A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber “warfare”. As with any type of politics it’s important to know precisely who is making the claims and what their interests are.’ Photograph: Daniel Law/PA

A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: “It’s not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for news, but what you don’t print.”

He wasn’t talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The professionalism of the craft isn’t simply learning to write or broadcast what other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and challenge, and checking out stories you’ve discovered through your own curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.

Scepticism was in short supply this week when breathless claims about the collapse of the internet were published in such reputable publications as the New York Times, the BBC and even technical journal Ars Technica, all falling prey to the hyped-up drama of a DDoS attack against Spamhaus, a group that tracks spammers, and their alleged attacker Cyberbunker, a Dutch hosting company Spamhaus had blacklisted.

Ars Technica described the attack as at “a scale that’s threatening to clog up the internet’s core infrastructure and make access to the rest of the internet slow or impossible”. “If a Tier 1 provider fails, that risks breaking the entire internet,” it continued.

There is risk everywhere. Being alive carries the risk of death. It’s no good just saying what might happen (that’s the role of a screenwriter or novelist), what matters is the likelihood of it happening. The “risk” of the entire internet breaking from such an attack is very small. That should have killed off the worst of the scaremongering headlines and alerted the sceptical reporter that something was afoot.

A lot of people have a lot to gain from peddling scare stories about cyber “warfare”. As with any type of politics it’s important to know precisely who is making the claims and what their interests are.

In whose interest is it to hype up the collapse of the internet from a DDoS attack? Why, the people who provide cyber security services of course. And looking at the reporting, almost all the sources are directly involved and have a vested interest. The claims about the scale of the attack are from CloudFlare, the anti-DDoS firm hired by Spamhaus to ward off the attack. Eschewing subtlety they blogged about the event: “The DDos that Almost Broke the Internet”.

As soon as you have a source with a direct involvement, scepticism should be your guide. Sadly, reporters don’t always have the time or space for scepticism, and increasingly they are judged only on their ability to fill space at speed. In this environment there is no incentive to challenge a good yarn.

While the infrastructure of the internet might not be easy for reporters to understand, simply juxtaposing quotes from opposing sides isn’t all there is to journalism. Yes, this was a big attack in terms of traffic directed against one website (approx 300Gbps), but the internet seemed to cope just fine.

Even if you knew nothing about technology, you could have done what Sam Biddle did at Gizmodo and simply asked some challenging, sceptical questions such as:

• Why wasn’t my internet slow?
• Why didn’t anyone notice this over the course of the past week, when it began?
• Why isn’t anyone without a financial stake in the attack saying the attack was this much of a disaster?
• Why haven’t there been any reports of Netflix outages, as the New York Times and BBC reported?
• Why do firms that do nothing but monitor the health of the web, like Internet Traffic Report, show zero evidence of this Dutch conflict spilling over into our online backyards?

This story wasn’t just a failure to understand technology. It was a failure of basic journalism practice. To be willing to not write the story if it didn’t stack up.

This is the danger of the “dark age of journalism”, as it has been called. The training of the old Reuters reporter is replaced by one of political and corporate collusion. The separation between newsrooms and public relations agencies growing ever thinner as reporters rush to fill space at all costs, regardless of truth.

Even after she’d written the piece in the New York Times, tech reporter Nicole Perlroth tweeted how she was still getting targeted by corporate PRs to cover the “story”: “Hi Nicole, News is just breaking on the biggest cyber-attack in history. Are you planning on covering?”

The collapse of journalism combined with complex, fast-changing technology offers a wealth of opportunity for propagandists. In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown. So it is with cyberwarfare.

Jemima Khan so believed in the cause of WikiLeaks, of opening up state secrets to the public gaze, that she put up bail for Julian Assange, a man accused of rape and sexual assault. Now, in an article for the New Statesman she writes of her disillusionment, warning that he risks going from Jason Bourne to L. Ron Hubbard.

Mr Assange is an example of the crusading campaigner who equates righteousness with media attention. He hijacked a noble cause as a means of self-aggrandisement. Indeed, at his 40th birthday party he auctioned photographs of himself to the assembled celebrity admirers. Many people, not just Ms Khan, were so eager for him to be the person they wanted him to be that they failed or refused to see what he was: a morally questionable man exploiting idealistic supporters to advance his own fame.

Some cling to the fiction that Mr Assange “changed the game”. Did he? As a result of his actions governments across the world have been frightened into ever greater internet surveillance. If a campaigner’s ultimate aim is to change the law, WikiLeaks has failed.

WikiLeaks was at its best before Mr Assange took the credit for it, when it was a team publishing on the internet material that journalists couldn’t report in their own countries. The “megaleaks” of thousands of documents – the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the US diplomatic cables – were certainly powerful. But the credit belongs to Bradley Manning, the US soldier detained since 2010, who risked his life to make them public. It’s clear from his chat logs that educating the public was his goal, not granting Mr Assange a proprietorial licence to cajole journalists into writing sycophantic profiles. For that reason I was happy to break his monopoly and leak his most precious leak – the diplomatic cables.

“WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups,” Jemima Khan writes. No it didn’t. It was exposed by Private Manning and the reporters who spent weeks digging through the data to make sense of it and produce stories that stacked up. Mr Assange’s contribution was to organise – or rather get his young interns and lackeys to organise – the huge press conference in which he starred as saviour.

Mr Assange is, at best, a middle man of the Max Clifford variety, brokering deals between source and newspaper. Except that Private Manning got only incarceration and a potential life sentence. Far from advancing the cause of openness worldwide, Mr Assange has gravely undermined it by so shamelessly making it all about himself.

Anonymity is a privilege. Words are powerful and if that power is not to be abused it must be accountable.

There are some cases where granting the privilege of anonymity is necessary and warranted. Primarily this is where direct harm would befall someone if he or she were identified as the source of the words. Such is the case with whistleblowers, insiders or someone in a vulnerable position. If these people are identified, they face the immninent threat of losing their jobs, their livlihoods or their well-being. They may face personal attack (physical or legal) for speaking out. They may be breaking corporate confidentiality even though what they expose is in the public interest.

Others need anonymity to be able to voice inconvenient truths, or to simply tell their stories. Women posting about driving without a male overseer in Saudi Arabia, for example, need anonymity to avoid being arrested.

The primary justification for anonymity is provable harm.

There are other occasions where people use anonymity to take on a different persona in order to explore different parts of themselves or simply for fun. I don’t see a problem with this so long as they aren’t hurting anyone.

But the idea that anonymity is a right and not a privilege is wrong. There needs to be good reason to avoid being accountable for what we say or write, particularly if what we say affects other people. Too often online, anonymity is the tool of the bullying coward, a means to avoid responsibility for publishing threats, abuse and lies.

That doesn’t mean writing only anodyne, inoffensive drivel. It does mean having the courage of your convictions and the ability to withstand criticism. If you believe in what you say, put your name behind it. People may disagree with you. That’s fine. But if they launch an anonymous ad hominem attack that is not fine. It reveals a weak argument made by someone who is a coward, a fool and/or a nasty piece of work.

…I can count on one finger my Boston contacts. Fortunately that person is Aaron Swartz, who’s in the Cambridge tech/activist scene. He describes himself as a writer, activist and hacker and at twenty-five his CV is impressive: currently founder and director of a democracy campaign group, Demand Progress, he previously co-founded Reddit.com (a website for sharing news links) and was part of the original team to launch Creative Commons. At fourteen he co-authored the Really Simple Syndication (RSS 1.0) specification for publishing news updates. In the information war he’s participated in a few guerrilla campaigns which have accorded him his own FBI file (posted on his blog). In 2008, he hacked into a federal court library system to leak over 18 million public documents that the government had been charging citizens to access. Swartz only realised how much trouble he was in when the FBI started monitoring him. He got himself a lawyer, but luckily the New York Times got on the case and made him something of a cause célèbre. The FBI eventually backed off: it looked bad to spend taxpayers’ money going after a kid for making public records more publicly available.

I decide not to press my host any further, but I’m struck by his guardedness. Clearly people are scared, and I begin to worry if I’ll get anything at all out of this trip. Maybe to make up for his reticence, Mako invites me to come along to a pub in Harvard Square where every Sunday he organises a social evening for a group of techie friends studying or working at MIT or Harvard. I meet all sorts of interesting people including a woman working on the human genome project, but the most interesting of all is another Brit who tells me he lives with Danny Clark…
—

While I was in Boston, Aaron told me he was working on another ‘project’ which I found out later was his guerrilla action to liberate academic articles. In July 2011, he was arrested and charged with downloading 4.8 million academic articles between September 2010 and January 2011 from JSTOR, a research subscription service offering digitised copies of academic journals and documents. He was accused of breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT’s campus and downloading the documents which prosecutors say he intended to share online. Swartz turned himself in and pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. He was released on a $100,000 unsecured bond and faced up to thirty-five years in prison, if convicted. In September 2012, federal prosecutors added even more charges.

Aaron wasn’t a dangerous person who hurt people. His mission was to free public information. Shamefully for that he was targeted by certain justice officials in what amounted to more of a persecution than a prosecution. I think the war on hackers has gone on long enough. Officials need to understand that criminalising the best and the brightest is not good public policy.

More on Aaron Swartz here and here.

The Sunday Times, 24 December 2012

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has always sat uncomfortably with the British government. Britain was one of the last western democracies to adopt the act and officials were so worried about people’s “right to know” that implementation of the law was put off for five years — the longest preparation time in the world. Indeed, Tony Blair described its passage as “one of the biggest mistakes I made in office”.

That should tell you all you need to know about officials’ fear of real public engagement. Responding to what people actually want to know is a different form of democracy from telling people what you want them to know through bloated governmental press offices.

After the expenses scandal, this government came to power on a transparency mandate and has substantially improved matters, opening up large tracts of official data, publishing more public spending information than ever before and even providing pay grades for public officials. We are still a long way from what a company chief executive would expect to see from his employees — exact pay and perks for all staff employees with their name attached — but things have improved dramatically.

However, all that good work is about to be undone by one worrying change announced last week in the government’s response to post-legislative scrutiny of the FOIA. This would allow officials to “take into account some or all of the time spent on considering and redacting when calculating whether the costs limit has been exceeded”.

After I won my long FOI battle in the High Court for MPs’ expenses data, parliamentary officials used this excuse as a reason not to publish the data by the specified deadline of October 2008. They claimed it was taking a great deal of time and resources to “consider” and “redact” (ie, censor) the receipts. I suspected that they were trying to redact as much as possible with the specific aim of inflating the costs in order to suppress publication. When an insider leaked the entire database in May 2009 to The Daily Telegraph it appeared that supposition was correct.

The government claims this change to the law “would affect only a small number of FOI requests” but in reality, almost all but the most anodyne request could be blocked if this change is approved. Any request an official wants blocked, he will simply rack up “thinking” time by having meetings with his chums and the request will be refused as being too expensive to answer. If this change goes through, it will be the death knell of FOI in this country.

The government also seeks to lower the cost limit for requests from the current £600 to £450. Yes, we must make cuts in these times of austerity, but officials should remember the information in question was created and stored at taxpayers’ expense so it is churlish to deny them the results of their contribution.

Another ruse to stop people asking too many awkward questions is a proposal to prohibit any one person or organisation from making multiple requests within a certain time limit, regardless of merit. There is already an exemption for vexatious requests so this would target the media and those trying to do serious investigation. In America, members of the media are granted a fee waiver under its FOIA to encourage their use of the act. Does the British government want to be seen to be giving the opposite message, of obstructing the media?

There are many problems with the FOIA as it currently is written and enforced but the government’s response, I would argue, is biased against the general public interest. Public bodies, particularly the police, routinely ignore requests and time limits. Officials actively seek to avoid their statutory duty to provide advice and assistance to those who make requests by refusing to provide any direct contact information. The individual has to shoulder all costs at an appeal while public bodies are funded by the very public from whom they are seeking to hide information. There are no sanctions against public bodies that actively obstruct or delay answering requests. And while the government has proposed increasing the statute of limitations for the criminal offence of lying or destroying information subject to a request, it has not taken the parliamentary committee’s advice of making this a crown court offence with substantial financial penalties.

Transparency and accountability are the only forms of competition that exist to ensure monopoly public services work for the wider public interest and not special, or private interests. If the government wants to retain — or even obtain — trust for the decisions it makes, then the more original source material that is out there the better.

In the long term a good FOI regime benefits not just the public but the legitimacy of public services.

It is deeply disturbing to read Brian Leveson’s recommendations on regulating the press at a time when police and security services are trying to legalise the broadest surveillance powers yet on ordinary citizens.

The Leveson Inquiry was “sparked by public revulsion about a single action – the hacking of the mobile phone of a murdered teenager”.  Yet the Communications Data Bill will give the state a legal right not simply to ‘hack’ voicemails, but rather to spy on all our communication – both telephone and internet – without judicial oversight. 

Regulating the press? The state spying on its citizens? These are not the hallmarks of a democracy. When the supposed torch-bearers of Enlightenment values fall under the spell of authoritarianism, we must worry not only for ourselves, but for the citizens of truly authoritarian countries. The West is in danger of abdicating its values and becoming a place where the stifling of a free press and universal surveillance of citizens is legitimised.

The Leveson report is a screaming in the wind by an Establishment who cannot believe how fast power is slipping from its grasp in the digital age. Watching the hearings I was reminded of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ with Leveson as Norma Desmond, waiting for his close up. 

Leveson is an exercise in delusion and denial. For the sad fact is that newspapers are dying. News is now online. Digital information does not respect national borders. If there is any jurisdiction it does respect it is that of the United States where most of the major technology companies operate and where there is a First Amendment protecting free speech and a free press. The judges, lawyers, the great and the good of Britain who once controlled what could be said, now cannot. In their pique, they are in danger of throwing away what still matters: our democratic values.

Leveson deals with inconvenient truths – such as the largely self-regulating internet – by ignoring it. The sheer bulk of the report symbolises bias towards a statist ideology where bigger is better and centralised state control best of all. That the Internet has become so fabulously successful precisely because it is not centrally regulated is again ignored. 

A few proposals are worth singling out. Leveson acknowledges the importance of whistleblowers in identifying and alerting us of corruption and injustice. But the ‘us’ he refers to are not the public. Even when he admits there is no authority within the police service that commands the trust of officers, he wants only a confidential channel. He proposes that employment or service contracts include a clause ‘to the effect that no disciplinary action would be taken against them as a result of a refusal to act in a manner which is contrary to the code of practice’. But this is limited only to journalists’ contracts. Why not public servants such as NHS staff where gagging clauses can be found that deter, undermine and penalise whistleblowers? They are dealing dealing with matters of life and death.

He claims the “Police Service as a whole has responded positively and proactively”, which is not what the journalists who investigated phone-hacking say. And if the police did fail to do their job, Leveson forgives that, too, because they had ‘perfectly reasonably decided to limit the prosecutions in 2006 not least because of their incredible workload that was a consequence of terrorism.’ No such real-world pressures – such as lack of public records, severe financial constraints even the collapse of the industry – are accepted for newspapers. 

He concludes that the press is too close to politicians and the police but entirely ignores why this is so. In Britain, there is simply no other way to get information without getting close to either. It is the secrecy of the system that has created the collusion and the information cartels. 

Despite all my efforts to investigate MPs’ expenses using the law, in the end it came down to an inside leak paid for with cash. Newspapers are pragmatic. They operate in the system as they find it. The only reason I was different is that I came from America where the records are public and there is less need for reporters to collude with the powerful to get information.

Check out the Guardian’s Prince Charles page for the latest news on our unelected and unaccountable heir to the throne.

See the video at the TED Site.

You couldn’t make it up. While the UK Transparency twitter feed was sending out gushing messages about Cabinet Minister Francis Maude’s latest open government agenda, Speaker John Bercow, in cahoots with Tory MP Julian Lewis, was trying a rear-guard action to keep MPs’ expenses secret. 

You’d have thought Bercow might remember how his predecessor was brought low due to his obstinate stance on publishing expenses. But no. They’re at it again. Even a High Court ruling isn’t getting in their way. In 2008, MPs argued against my freedom of information request to disclose the full details of their second home allowance and address. They claimed such disclosure would endanger them. They had no proof. Just their own paranoid narcissism. Three of the nation’s top judges ruled in my favour saying that public accountability required the claims and addresses be published. Now some MPs are trying to subvert that ruling by stealth. The new broom, it seems, still has some sweeping to do. 

I had a few words to say about it on Sky News.

Friday 12 October 2012 – 8pm Wells Literary Festival
Wells, England
I’ll be speaking on the opening day of the Wells Literary Festival. For more information and to book tickets check out the Wells Festival website.

Monday 22 October 2012 – 7pm – Off the Shelf Festival of Words
Sheffield, England
I’ll be talking about the revolutionary aspect of digitising information and how it’s changing politics and power around the world at Off the Shelf. Click here for more information and to book tickets.

Monday to Wednesday 29 – 31st October, 2012 – Power Reporting Conference
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa
I’ll be speaking and doing hands-on teaching sessions at this conference, the leading investigative journalism conference in Africa. If you live anywhere nearby then I’d urge you to come along. There is a fantastic line-up of journalists who have done some stellar investigations both in Africa and abroad. For more information visit the Power Reporting website.

But in England the links between government and newspapers are much more remote and subtle. The newspaper press is largely trustified – that is, controlled by rich men whose interests on the whole are bound up with conservatism. At the same time the commercial aspect of newspapers – reader-interest on the one hand and advertising on the other – make daily newspapers incline towards sensationalism, which means, towards opening their columns to anything which seems likely to increase circulation. And this sensationalism, bad as it is on the aesthetic and moral sides, does at least ensure a continuation of competition and rivalry in enterprise, which brings in its wake much of what we value as “freedom of expression of opinion.”

From “Propaganda” by Richard S. Lambert (Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1938)

The theme of the conference is Radical Openness. Looking forward to hearing some interesting ideas!

UPDATE: While I don’t yet know when the talk will go online, there is a blog post about it on the TED website.

• 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