In an era when whistleblowers are under attack from the authorities and confidential sources are being compromised by state surveillance, how can the people who provide journalists with valuable information be protected?
Some answers can be found in research carried out for Unesco by the World Editors Forum (WEF). The paper, called “Protecting journalism source in the digital age”, suggests a framework for assessing the conditions necessary to provide protection.
It has been published as part of a wider, ongoing study by WEF, which is investigating the protection of journalistic sources in 121 countries around the world.
Its initial findings show that more than 100 of these countries have had some form of source protection in place since 2007. But these frameworks are at risk from national security and anti-terrorism legislation.
So the report’s author, Julie Posetti, believes there is an urgent need to revise and strengthen them and points to the problems faced by inadequate source protection:
• pre-publication exposure of journalistic investigations which may trigger
cover-ups, intimidation, or destruction of information;
• revelation of sources’ identities with legal or extra-legal repercussions for
them;
• sources of information running dry;
• self-censorship by journalists and, more broadly, by citizens.
So what’s to be done? Her study proposes an 11-point “assessment tool” for measuring the effectiveness of legal source protection frameworks:
- Recognise the value to the public interest of source protection, with its legal foundation in the right to freedom of expression (including press freedom), and to privacy. These protections should also be embedded within a country’s constitution and/or national law.
- Recognise that source protection should extend to all acts of journalism and across all platforms, services and mediums (of data storage and publication), and that it includes digital data and meta-data.
- Recognise that source protection does not entail registration or licensing of practitioners of journalism.
- Recognise the potential detrimental impact on public interest journalism, and on society, of source-related information being caught up in bulk data recording, tracking, storage and collection.
- Affirm that state and corporate actors (including third party intermediaries), who capture journalistic digital data must treat it confdentially (acknowledging also the desirability of the storage and use of such data being consistent with the general right to privacy).
- Shield acts of journalism from targeted surveillance, data retention and handover of material connected to confdential sources.
- Define exceptions to all the above very narrowly, so as to preserve the principle of source protection as the effective norm and standard.
- Define exceptions as needing to conform to a provision of “necessity” and “proportionality”... in other words, when no alternative to disclosure is possible, when there is greater public interest in disclosure than in protection, and when the terms and extent of disclosure still preserve confdentiality as much as possible.
- Define a transparent and independent judicial process with appeal potential for authorised exceptions, and ensure that law-enforcement agents and judicial actors are educated about the principles involved.
- Criminalise arbitrary, unauthorised and wilful violations of confdentiality of sources by third party actors.
- Recognise that source protection laws can be strengthened by complementary whistleblower legislation.
That’s perfection, of course. And, using that framework as a guide, how do you think Britain measures up?
Source (and full report): WAN-IFRA. Hat tip: journalism.co.uk
