The war on whistle-blowers

In the Australian raids, authorities are specifically after the sources of the leaks as journalists are protected by the National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Act 2018.

Common to all the cases above is that it is not elected administrations which are pursuing those who leak government documents. It appears to be faceless, unelected, and primarily unaccountable bureaucrats who are running police and security agencies.  These faceless and almost unaccountable people have become ‘over-zealous’ in protecting government secrets.

The Trump Administration has been mostly silent on the Assange case, leaving the matter to the prosecutors. Chelsea Manning is in jail again over the same matter she was imprisoned for, even though Obama commuted her sentence before leaving office. The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison interviewed in London after the AFP raids on the ABC claimed the AFP is acting on their own and have not received any directions from his government on the matter. Morrisons comments were supportive of the AFP, showing no concern for their heavy handedness in the raids.

Elected politicians have allowed and supported increases in police and security agency power, ever since 911. Democraticly elected governments have been giving more powers to police and security agencies for surveillance and allowed these unaccountable agencies to build mammoth apparatus to spy on their own citizens as the author reported previously.

The actions of these largely unaccountable bureaucracies have been far from infallible. The question here is with past mistakes, can police and security agencies be trusted with the powers they are using to act in society’s best interests?

The AFP has made a number of operational decisions that have put Australian citizens in harm’s way. A high ranking Malaysian Government official told the author that the Malaysian Police had asked the AFP for guidance about drug traffickers Kevin Barlow and Geoffrey Chambers before arresting them at Penang airport in 1983. The official said the Malaysian police were told by the AFP to proceed with the arrest and deal with them under Malaysian law which meant a mandatory death penalty. It was the AFP who tipped off the Indonesian authorities about the activities of the Bali Nine rather than arrest them on Australian soil. This led to the execution of two Australian citizens, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. More recently, the AFP slipped up in the Hakeen al-Araibi case, by failing to lift an Interpol Red Notice, which led to al-Araibi’s unnecessary incarceration in a Thai jail for two months.

An organization that has a track record of having little regard to the welfare and safety of Australian citizens and has the power of being able to spy on journalists without their knowledge is dangerous. The power to spy on journalists was only revealed through a slip up by the AFP in 2015 where it became public knowledge that AFP officers could seek a Journalist Information Warrant in secret under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015.

It appears that the strategy to catch whistle-blowers has now been expanded to using intimidation on journalists to reveal their sources. The APF raid on the ABC can be seen as being part of a power play. The treatment of individuals like Bryan Carmody by using sledgehammers to break open his door and handcuffs, and going through Annika Smethurst’s underwear seem to be nothing more than straight intimidation.

The powerful police and security agencies seem to be directly challenging the convention in democratic countries that the media be given ample room to investigate and publish information in what is arguably in the public interest.

With the Assange case going on, the raid on a journalist in San Francisco, and raids in Australia being largely unchallenged, the potential for good investigative journalism that uncovered scandals like Watergate may not be allowed to happen in the future.

Assange has been smeared to the point where the body of uninformed public opinion believes he deserves what is happening to him. In the Carmody case, authorities tried to narrow the definition of a journalist to exclude freelancing. This is what authorities are also doing in the Assange case, trying to associate him with stealing information, rather than reporting and publishing it. Some of the Australian public believe that the National Broadcaster is too far to the left and as a consequence needs to be put into check. Authorities have been using public opinion as a cover to move on public rights and freedoms.

The corporate media are partly to blame for this by their complacency on the issue of eroding public rights and freedoms. This is forcing good investigative journalism out of the corporations to small independent media agencies with meniscal resources.