At a time when journalists have never been more needed to explain the complexities of an increasingly integrated world, they have never been more under threat: jailed in increasing numbers by some of the more authoritarian administrations, threatened with prosecution in the countries which have democratic governments. There is a real possibility that the over-reach of national security laws in the West will damage the very commodity that heightened internet surveillance is supposedly designed to protect: security and liberty.
The ultimate absurdity is that the most extraordinarily liberating communications system invented since the printing press could bring the West down by being turned into a tool of oppression and censorship. Created originally as a way for signals between military commanders to withstand the destructive electromagnetic forces unleashed during a nuclear war, it became a beacon for democracy, encouraging an uninhibited flow of information around the planet. From a San Francisco newspaper which provided the first online version in the early 1980s, the internet eventually allowed readers to subscribe to just about any newspaper, anywhere in the world. Television went online, transmitting its programmes across international borders. Information stored in the world’s libraries were available at the click of mouse. But now the internet, which couldn’t be shut down by a nuclear attack, is subject to assault from within. The offices of government that played a role in its building want to take back the control they lost when the public gained access and embraced it as its own.
The internet is a dangerous place, we are told, where terrorists can freely roam, plotting to attack the West, using encryption to scramble their messages and blind security agencies. The problem is, nothing could be further from the truth. As was pointed out earlier, nearly three quarters of those people who committed terrorist acts in Western countries in the last one and a half decades were known to the authorities. Yet the clamour in the West is for more controls on those who use the internet for communications, but little control of the governments who use it for surveillance. The role of journalists is grudgingly accepted by Western nations as an inconvenient necessity, as a measure of democracy, but the fact is executive government has done all it can to manage the news, to restrict what journalists can reveal about the secret activities of state. One well-tried method of control is to ‘shoot the messenger’, or at least cripple his or her capability to reveal important and unpleasant truths. Which is why laws passed in so many jurisdictions around the world give little cover for journalists carrying out their important role of holding the powerful to account. Journalists and journalism are suffering from a ‘chilling effect’ where sources are afraid to speak for fear that surveillance will capture either their movements or their communications, and journalists are worried that they may inadvertently reveal the identities of their sources to the authorities. The fact that during the ten years he was in office, President Barack Obama prosecuted more whistle-blowers than all the presidents in US history combined is an indication of the increasing threat to journalism. And in 2017 the head of the CIA questioned the first amendment rights which protect free speech, while the US attorney-general threatened that Julian Assange would be prosecuted (for what he was not clear). Both are acts of intimidation designed to silence. In the UK and Australia there are fresh proposals that, if they ever become law, will see journalists jailed for simply possessing information the government has decided should be restricted.
It has been argued that governments are not that concerned about most of the work that journalists do, so for most, concerns about surveillance are not necessary. But the problem there is that generally speaking, if governments are not worried about what journalists are doing, the journalists are not doing their jobs. Reporting local news may be a useful social function, but the issues that arise where nations go to war, or where countries are involved in breaking the law, or plundering the treasure of other nations, are of great importance and need investigating. It is in these significant areas that journalists must be protected from the vested interests of the executive state; where the very people who make the decisions, as in the Iraq War, need to be exposed and held to account before the event, not after it. The invasion of Iraq, and the rise of global terrorism as a consequence, created huge pressure on governments to be seen to be taking action to protect the public.
What is so disturbing is that the media itself has often aided and abetted governments and the intelligence agencies – who always want more access to information – as they invoked the fear of terrorism as grounds for introducing tougher surveillance laws.
The most egregious exponents of this form of complicity in spreading the false hope of complete safety can be seen in the UK where right-wing newspapers, in league with a Conservative government, prosecuted a nationalist case: the state will guarantee security if the subjects give up their privacy. Journalists who expose unpalatable issues are faced with hysterical charges of treason for helping expose the blatant disregard for the laws, as revealed by Edward Snowden. Where does this leave journalists? Already in a weakened position because of the devastation wrought on the profitability of newspapers and other media by Facebook and other news aggregators, many have turned to collective action using the internet, to work co-operatively. Organisations like WikiLeaks led the way by providing documents and analysis, partnering with newspapers like The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Spain’s El Pais, to produce outstanding and revelatory journalism. Edward Snowden’s disclosures came to light through the activities of a then online blogger, Glen Greenwald, who in turn teamed up with The Guardian. Along with the Washington Post they produced the greatest series of scoops in the history of journalism. The Panama Papers are another example of journalists working collectively to create outstanding results to the benefit of the public.
But even the International Consortium of Journalists, whose reports did not deal with matters of state security, needed to be extremely careful about protecting their information and their sources. They used encryption and apparently stored some of their information on computer systems in Iceland, making use of the friendly environment that exists in that country to protect data and privacy. It should not come as a surprise that Western governments increasingly vilify the use of secure encrypted communications, but it is a dangerous argument, both at home and among the less democratic nations that copy their every move to clamp down on dissent. Yet here the role of the journalist, with the need for confidentiality, comes into sharp conflict with the desire of the state for secrecy. States which should be publicly accountable demand privacy, while only allowing limited privacy to those who hold them to account. As we have seen in recent history, there is little new in this dilemma, from the prosecution of those like Duncan Campbell, who exposed the increasing surveillance powers of the UK government in the mid-1970s to the present-day hounding of journalists even in the United States, where free speech and the right to publish are enshrined in the Constitution. But since the days of fax machines and letters gave way to digital transmissions, communication now only has one highway. Since it is largely impractical to use an alternative method of delivering information, it is necessary to change the form that the message takes. A system of encryption is the simplest way for journalists to protect information, from a simple direct message system such as WhatsApp or Signal to the more complex Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). But even encryption, with its greatly increased use since the Snowden revelations, is not foolproof, and can expose the source to the attention of security agencies because their activities stand out from the crowd as, even now, all too few people use any form of encrypted technology.
What we do know is that information so far made public in the United States reveals that dragnet surveillance did not help the FBI to stop terrorists. The fact is that most terrorists are known to the authorities in the Western societies they attack, suggesting that the ‘collect it all’ process is both inefficient and does not work in protecting nations from attack.
Much of the evidence suggests that diverting money from surveillance systems that randomly collect information on everyone on the planet, to investigating known suspects would be a more efficient way to combat political violence. But as we have seen, the powerful industrialised countries, the most notable of which are the Five Eyes, use their unquestioned surveillance powers in cyber space for other reasons, to gather industrial information, and to potentially prepare for cyber war.
The argument that government oversight measures are effective is provably wrong, given what we know about what happened in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Even a great democracy like the United States can be subverted by wilful politicians and a sometimes compliant media.
Unless there is a concerted effort by the West to abandon the surveillance state into which we are all being drawn, it is highly likely that the journalism that relies on dissent to expose the great injustices perpetrated by governments, particularly when they hide behind the cloak of national security, will be journalism of the past. It won’t disappear overnight, but will fade slowly over the years, like the democracy it defends.