Is the Foreign & Commonwealth's Cayman Governor Suggesting Media Censorship?

Gov’s office argues media ‘unregulated and uncontrolled’

Governor Kilpatrick

Records related to the Operation Tempura police corruption investigation in the Cayman Islands should not be released, partly because those who might report them are not regulated or controlled with regard to the publication of such claims, according to the governor’s office arguments put forward in submissions to Cayman’s information commissioner.

Precisely what type of regulations or controls should exist in the Cayman Islands news media – at least in the view of the governor’s office - were not discussed in a decision Acting Information Commissioner Jan Liebaers released Friday. That decision ordered the governor’s office to make public nearly all of a 2010 complaint filed over the investigation by Operation Tempura’s former legal adviser and the then-governor’s subsequent evaluation of it.

The governor’s submission to Mr. Liebaers in arguing against disclosure of the Operation Tempura records noted that the dangers of releasing a complaint that it believed would falsely undermine the Cayman Islands judiciary were greater because "the dissemination of allegations through the media in the Cayman Islands is wholly unregulated and uncontrolled."

"There is substantial risk that the coverage of the allegations will not be properly balanced by the findings contained in the lengthy report [which evaluated the complaint]," the governor’s office submission stated. Mr. Liebaers said previous rulings from the information commissioner’s office had dealt with this subject.

"Questions of access to a record held by government cannot be concerned with how that record might be used in the future," Mr. Liebaers noted, quoting from a previous open records case that was appealed before the information commissioner’s office. "This would be a shortcut to censorship and would contradict the fundamental objectives of the Freedom of Information Law.

"Either a record is exempt under the law or it is not, but in either case, any presumed future use of a record can have no bearing on its disclosure."

Mr. Liebaers went on to state that in a democratic society like the Cayman Islands, the press "has every right to express their views freely" including views that might be critical of government.

"It seems futile to wonder how this case would play out if the media were ‘regulated and controlled’," the information commissioner continued. "No doubt this would reduce the disclosure of information by government considerably and increase the number of articles in the media favorable to government, but that is not the constitutional and statutory framework within which this reconsideration is taking place." More

 

Freedom of Expression part of our Bill of Rights under the Constitution of the Cayman Islands

Expression

11.—(1) No person shall be hindered by government in the enjoyment of his or her freedom of expression, which includes freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference, and freedom from interference with his or her correspondence or other means of communication. (2) Nothing in any law or done under its authority shall be held to contravene this section to the extent that it is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society— (a) in the interests of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health; (b) for the purpose of protecting the rights, reputations and freedoms of other persons or the private lives of persons concerned in legal proceedings, preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, maintaining the authority and independence of the courts, or regulating telecommunications, posts, broadcasting or other means of communication, or public shows or entertainments; or (c) for the imposition of restrictions on public officers in the interests of the proper performance of their functions.

 

© 2014

NSA surveillance revelations: Osama bin Laden would love this

Washington has handed Osama bin Laden his last and greatest triumph. The Prism files revealed in the Guardian indicate how far his bid to undermine western values has succeeded in the 12 years since 9/11.

He has achieved state intrusion into the private lives and communications of every American citizen. He has shown the self-proclaimed home of individual freedom as so paranoid in the face of his "terror" as to infiltrate the entire internet, sucking up mobile phone calls, emails, texts and, we may assume, GPS movements.

The vast databases of Microsoft, Google, YouTube and Facebook are open to government. They may cry "your privacy is our priority", but they lie. Obedience to regulatory authority is their priority. And what does authority say? It says what authority always says: "We collect significant information on bad guys, but only bad guys." As police states have said down the ages, the innocent have nothing to fear. For innocent, eventually read obedient.

This is the same trawling power that the British security services want parliament to approve in its snooper's charter. It is defended on the same basis, that it is only exchanges, not content, that they seek. They do not really mean to snoop. And they do it only where "national security" is involved. Pull the other one. That is what the Stasi said. You can almost sense the smirk as they say it. And they have even persuaded half of parliament that they are right.

Inducing such paranoia about terror – always called "al-Qaida-linked terror" – is precisely what Islam's jihadist regard as the crucial first step in undermining the west's pseudo-liberalism. It requires democracy to lose faith in oversight, to let securocrats off the leash, to capitulate to "better safe than free". It requires the regular click up the ratchet of control sought by each successive British home secretary. They are Bin Laden's useful idiots.

The western democracies, and especially America and Britain, are the most invulnerable states on earth. They are rich and secure. They may suffer occasional explosions and killings, but they face not the remotest risk of "existential defeat". Yet 9/11 brought into being an edifice of creeping surveillance and repression which democracy is clearly unable to curb. It has never been so at risk as now, from its own loss of faith in liberty. Osama bin Laden would be clapping his hands with glee. More

 

Spying on the Media and the US Congress: The AP Seizures and the Frightening Web They’ve Uncovered

“Paranoia,” said Woody Allen, “is knowing all the facts.” By that measure, we’re becoming more and more “paranoid” every day.

This week, we learned that the Obama Justice Department seized two months of records [1] of at least 20 phone lines used by Associated Press reporters. These include phone lines in the AP’s New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn offices as well as the main AP number in the House of Representatives press gallery, the private phones and cell phones belonging to AP reporters and a fax line in one AP office.

The government effected this massive seizure “sometime this year” according to a letter from the Justice Department to AP’s chief counsel this past Friday (May 10).

The letter cites relevant “permission” clauses in its “investigative guidelines” and makes clear that it considers the action legal and necessary.

In many ways, this is the most blatant act of media information seizure in memory. It affects over 100 AP journalists and the countless people those journalists communicated with by phone during those two months. It violates accepted constitutional guarantees, the concept of freedom of the press and the privacy rights of literally thousands of people. Predictably and justifiably, press, politicians and activists have expressed outrage.

But as outrageous as the admitted facts are, the story’s larger implications are even more disturbing. It’s bad enough that the Obama Administration has grossly violated fundamental constitutional rights, acknowledged the violation and defended their legality. Even worse is that likelihood that the intrusion will probably be ruled legal, that it has been ongoing against other targets for some time and that this is only the tip of the intelligence-abuse iceberg.

The facts are still tumbling out daily but here’s what we know. While the Justice Department’s letter of notice to AP didn’t provide the reason for the seizure, the date of the seizure or the dates of the data seized, the timing hints strongly that this is tied to a major investigation of “whistle-blowing”. Last year, the AP used unnamed sources in a story about a Central Intelligence Agency effort to disrupt a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner. The AP, at the government’s request, held that story for several days but published it on May 7, 2012 after it was confident the plot had been foiled. Because the AP’s story ran a day before Federal officials were scheduled to announce their “victory”, it’s logical to assume Associated Press honchos knew the government would be unhappy.

So they were probably not surprised that, led by the U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen, federal investigators spent a year aggressively searching for the people who leaked the information. That’s vintage Obama. With six government “whistle-blowers” in jail or being prosecuted, federal law-enforcers have prosecuted twice as many whistle-blowers [2] as all previous Administrations combined over the course of two and a quarter centuries. But until now, the media-savvy Obama people have been careful to restrain their pursuit of the corporate press, limiting confrontations to an occasional request or demand for one source revelation.

That’s why these revelations are so shocking to media professionals and advocates. As AP’s CEO Gary Pruitt told Attorney General Eric Holder in his letter of complaint this week[3], “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-months period, provide a road map to AP’s news gathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

There, in a nutshell, is the problem. For the corporate media, there is still such a concept as “no conceivable right to know”. Up to now, part of Obama’s information policy has been that mainstream media qualifies for First Amendment protection but “alternative” journalists and the news organizations they work for, as well as bloggers, activists, writers and others who work independently of major news organizations and who use the Internet as the free vehicle of communications it was invented to be have absolutely no protections. Since 2009, this government is known to have taken action against Internet activists and truth-tellers: seizing servers, email records and virtually all forms of on-line communications and then prosecuting people in over a dozen cases based on some of those seizures. There’s been very little action taken against the corporate press, which for its part has largely ignored or blacked out any reporting on the government attacks on its smaller media competitors.

This “favored status” commercial media has enjoyed has now been trashed. The “protected press” is as exposed as the rest of us. In answering Pruit’s letter, the Justice Department said as much. “We must notify the media organization in advance unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation,” U.S. Attorney’s Machen spokesman William Miller explained, in a remark that went way beyond the traditional exemption for protecting lives. He added, “…we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws.” More