On Tuesday 7 July 2015, the Frontline Club hosted a discussion on the problem of protecting journalistic sources in the age of digital surveillance.

Hosting the panel of experts was journalist and president of the Foreign Press Association Paola Totaro. The discussion touched upon issues of the law, journalist’s ethics, state transgression and best practices in protecting your sources.

The panel included journalists Julie Posetti, Jonathan Calvert and Paul Myers, as well as Gavin Millar QC, a specialist in media law.

Left to right: Gavin Millar QC, Jonathan Calvert, Paola Totaro, Paul Myers and Julie Posetti

The problem, Posetti said, is clandestine surveillance undercutting the legal protections of sources. “It’s all very well to say I can stand up in court and protect my source, but if my source has been exposed in a clandestine manner it becomes quite problematic,” she said.

Posetti, is an Australian journalist and academic and has been working on a UNESCO commissioned study on the protection of sources in the digital era. She told the Frontline Club that digital surveillance changes so quickly, working on the UNESCO report was “like working on a breaking story for a year and a half.”

“[Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian] said to me that he felt that dealing with the threat to the protection of sources in the digital age was a lot like fighting zombies,” Posetti said. “Every time you think you’ve solved a problem… another one will pop up, another door will open.”

Legal frameworks protecting journalists are being increasingly strained.

“They are increasingly at risk or erosion, restriction and compromise… [representing] a direct challenge to the established universal rights, human rights, to freedom and privacy,” said Posetti.

Importantly this is not just an issue for the UK. “In many states the consequence for an investigate process being revealed are severe.”

Millar told the Frontline Club that most of the legal protection for journalists against digital surveillance actually originated from the European Union. He echoed Posetti’s concerns of state agencies subverting the law.

“There was an understanding, misplaced, that [state surveillance] didn’t go on where the purpose of exercising the power was to identify journalistic sources… That’s all gone down the pan in recent years unfortunately,” said Millar.

There is a lack of judicial oversight in the UK, said Millar, particularly with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Introduced in 2000, this law was designed to security services in counter terror however is being used by the police as a way to bypass the need to go through a judge

“The law enforcement agencies had got into the habit of the self help remedies that are available under RIPA and [authorise surveillance powers] without a judge being involved,” said Millar, who cited the Chris Huhne and the so called plebgate cases.

Gavin Millar QC (Left) and Jonathan Calvert

“There’s a strange correlation between political embarrassment and abuse of state powers when it comes to journalistic sources,” said Millar.

This abuse of surveillance powers, said Millar, is so ingrained in the working culture of law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the legal reforms proposed by Posetti and her UNESCO report would be ineffective if policing culture did not change with it.

“The principle is all fine and dandy, but it ain’t gonna be worth a hill of beans if they [the police and security services] don’t play ball, if the culture within those organisations is not… strictly and enthusiastically rule of law compliant,” said Millar. “I don’t even know to what extent they’re sidestepping even RIPA.”

What can be done by journalists to protect their sources in the meantime? First and foremost, said Calvert, is to always be aware that you can’t always protect your sources.

Currently the editor for The Sunday Time’s Insight Team, Calvert is an investigate journalist who has been working in the industry for decades. “I’ve sort of always have been aware that private detectives, government agencies can get access to my material,” he told the Frontline Club.

Paul Myers

Where possible, Calvert said that using low-tech methods is key to avoiding surveillance. “For year’s we’ve been doing things like going to internet cafés, using any old Hotmail address, using several Hotmail addresses, making sure we’re never connected to our IP address [a number unique to every computer]. And even this is not fool proof.”

There are online tools that can be used as well, said Myers, an internet research specialist at the BBC. Security can be cumbersome so first and foremost you need to know how at risk you are from surveillance and act accordingly.

It is also important to understand how your computer can leave a trail. “You could visit [a] website and leave a footprint from the BBC’s IP address, or you could set up a Hotmail account not realising that Hotmail betrays the fact that you used a BBC computer,” said Myers.

As for encryption; “You’re dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t,” said Myers; using too much encryption can cause suspicion. “It’s like kind of walking into a bank wearing sunglasses, a fedora and a fake beard; they don’t know who you are but they know you’re up to no good,” he said.

It’s important to remember, however, that despite the risks digital journalism has also made investigative journalism easier in other respects. “The Swiss leaks, offshore leaks, Luxemburg leaks, a whole range of leaks that have been in part, you know, depended on this age of reporting that rely on digital interaction with sources,” said Posetti.

“We are like cockroaches as investigative journalist,” Posetti said quoting Janine Gibson of Buzzfeed: “we must survive this, we have to keep going… I’m optimistic because I think ultimately we can establish the vital importance of investigative journalism.”

Acts of journalism should be shielded from targeted surveillance, data retention and handover of material connected to confidential sources. This is a key early finding from a recent study commissioned by UNESCO on the state of journalistic source protection in 121 countries.

Early findings from the study, Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age, authored by Australian journalist and journalism academic Julie Posetti, indicate that legal source protection frameworks in many of the countries studied are outdated and need strengthening. It also shows that they are being eroded by national security and anti-terrorism legislation; undercut by surveillance – both mass and targeted; and jeopardised both by mandatory data retention policies and pressure applied to third party intermediaries to release data.

UNESCO commissioned the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) to undertake the study and Posetti led the project in her capacity as WAN-IFRA Research Fellow.

In an event in partnership with the Foreign Press Association, we will be joined by the author of the study and other experts to discuss the implications of the findings and what needs to be done to ensure journalists can fully protect their sources.

Chaired by journalist, writer and Foreign Press Association President, Paola Totaro.

The panel:

Julie Posetti is an Australian journalist and journalism academic. A former news editor, presenter and political reporter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Posetti is currently based in Paris as a research fellow with the World Editors Forum and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. She is completing a PhD on “The Twitterisation of Journalism” at the University of Wollongong, Australia, where she teaches social journalism, radio, TV and multimedia storytelling. She recently completed a major UNESCO-commissioned study of journalistic source protection in the digital era in 121 countries for WAN-IFRA.

Gavin Millar QC has a broad practice spanning media, information, public, criminal, employment and discrimination law. He is a noted specialist in all areas of media law including defamation, privacy, breach of confidence, publishing contempts and reporting restrictions. He often represents media outlets, journalists and politicians in both civil and criminal proceedings.

Jonathan Calvert is the longest serving editor of the The Sunday Times’ Insight team in its 50 year history, having held the job for a decade. His first scoop for the team was exposing the cash for questions scandal as an undercover Insight reporter in 1994, and he soon after became investigations editor at The Observer where he oversaw a string of major exclusives. Since returning to The Sunday Times he has headed a long line of exclusives – most recently the Fifa files investigation which made waves around the world.

Paul Myers is a BBC internet research specialist. He joined the BBC in 1995 as a news information researcher. He also runs The Internet Research Clinic, a website dedicated to directing journalists to the best research links, apps and resources. His role in the BBC Academy sees him organise and deliver training courses related to internet investigation, data journalism, freedom of information, reporting statistics, working with social media, web design and image production. He has worked with leading programmes like Panorama, Watchdog, national news bulletins, BBC Online, local & national radio and the World Service.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

To begin with I fired up Tweetdeck, stuck in the relevant hashtags – #Iran, #IranElection, #Tehran, #GR88, and #Iran9 – and tried to keep on top of it all. But I quickly became frustrated with this approach; I was overwhelmed by the volume of material being produced as twitterers from all over the world flooded the hashtags.

Following people by location is also problematic because users can set a false Twitter location and this widely retweeted post encouraged people to change it to confuse the regime.

So I decided to create a new Twitter account in addition to my own account.* For the new account, I selected twitterers to follow who were on the ground in Iran and other useful twitterers to create a focussed source of front line information. 

I was aided in this process by people who had already published lists of the best Twitter sources and by handpicking twitterers while I was monitoring Tweetdeck. 

Interestingly, Iran’s Twitterati is also helping in the filtering process by identifying reliable twitterers and calling on other Twitter feeds to be ignored or blocked. A number of twitterers were desperately trying to ensure that reliable, first hand information was being circulated on the social networking site with varying degrees of success.       

By creating a smaller group of twitterers to monitor I do risk missing something interesting from a brand new twitterer (which would have to be treated very carefully in any case).

But this approach provides a much more manageable way of procuring relevant information. And if something crops up that was of real significance I’m confident that my smaller selected group would pick up on it pretty quickly. I can also dip back into Tweetdeck every now and then to make sure my smaller group is providing the necessary coverage.

*You could also do this by creating a group on Tweetdeck and this will save you creating a new Twitter account. But in this instance I found it easier simply to start afresh

While I’m not sure how possible it is for Twitter users to be tracked down by the regime, and Twitter usernames have been broadcast all over the Western media I have decided to err on the side of caution and have deliberately omitted some links from this post.