Netizen Report: Colombian Court Demands Password to Journalist’s Facebook Account · Global Voices
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Photo by Flickr user zeevveez. CC BY 2.0
Colombian investigative journalist William Solano is being prosecuted for slander after writing multiple articles for independent news site DCERCA on administrative corruption in his home municipality of Buga. Solano has also received personal threats in response to his work.
In the journalist’s ongoing trial, the local district attorney has sought access to Solano’s communications in order to identify key sources in his reporting, who until now have remained anonymous.
In late June, a judge Buga authorized the district attorney to search Solano’s Facebook account. The prosecutor is now demanding the journalist’s account password.
The Foundation for Press Freedom in Colombia says the order violates constitutional protections for the anonymity of journalists’ sources and has filed an action seeking to protect Solano from the search.
Civil liberties advocates at Bogotá’s Fundación Karisma also have spoken out firmly against the search authorization, calling it a violation of rights to press freedom and privacy, and noting that entering the journalist’s Facebook account will give authorities access to far more information than is needed for the case itself:
…en el caso de William Solano se autorizó a la fiscal a acceder no solo a la información relacionada con el caso….sino que además se autorizó conocer todo tipo de información relacionada con otros artículos escritos por el periodista (que también están protegidos por la reserva de la fuente) y a información personal y familiar (que nada tienen que ver con el caso y que debe quedar por fuera de las manos del Estado).
…in the case of William Solano, the district attorney was authorized to access not only information related to the case itself….but also to access any type of information related to other articles written by the journalist (these could also affect protected sources) along with personal and family information (which has nothing to do with the case and should stay out of the hands of the state.)
They also pointed to the fact that Facebook’s structure offers no tools for distinguishing between messages and posts that are — and are not — relevant to the case, without reading their contents and thus potentially breaching Solano’s privacy.
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Bahraini human rights leader Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to two years in prison in absentia for speaking to journalists. Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was unable to attend court because he has been hospitalized since April. He has spent most of the last year in solitary confinement while awaiting sentencing on allegations of tweeting against torture in Bahraini prisons, and is facing up to 15 years in prison. Rajab’s lawyers said of the news:
Being in hospital is a valid excuse under Bahraini law and his trial should be postponed till he can attend the court sessions, however; the judge decides to proceed with the trial and decided to issue the judgement on 10 July 2017 without hearing Nabeel’s defense, in total violation of [Bahraini law].
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The news adds an international dimension to the surveillance campaign: the team received diplomatic immunity, making it unlikely that a federal judge would have even been allowed to sign off on a warrant granting legal authority for the spying, even if they were asked to do so. As the government continues to deny responsibility for the espionage, opposition lawmakers and international officials are beginning to call for an independent inquiry into the scandal.
An anonymous group called “Je Suis Maidan” is using the controversial identification software FindFace to name and shame people who attended a rally last month in support of Russian opposition politician and blogger Alexey Navalny. The software enables users to match photographs to profile pages on the Russian competitor to Facebook, Vkontakte. FindFace was developed by a Russian advertiser named Maxim Perlin, and has been used to identify women in hidden-camera, non-consensual pornography videos and to coordinate a cyberbullying campaigns against adult film actresses. It requires people to pay to opt out of its network.
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Distributing “fake news” in the Philippines could land you in jail for up to five years, if a new bill filed by a senator passes. The bill criminalizes the “malicious distribution of fake news”, defined as “those which either intend to cause panic, division, chaos, violence, and hate, or those which exhibit a propaganda to blacken or discredit one’s reputation”. The bill has been criticized by media experts for its overly broad definitions, and could be used for censorship.
Ellery Roberts Biddle, Inji Pennu, Zara Rahman, Elizabeth Rivera, Nevin Thompson, Laura Vidal and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.