Why the Cybercrime Bill should worry journalists

AT A JOINT Select Committee meeting on Tuesday that took up the lapsed work of the last JSC on the Cybercrime Bill, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi seemed receptive to the idea of creating an exception clause for journalism for one of the most troubling provisions of the bill.

Section 8 of that legislation has two parts, one that describes the act of computer hacking for the purposes of illegal information retrieval and its penalties and another that does the same for making use of information gained by such means.

Al-Rawi suggested using the Reynolds Defence, a means of implementing qualified privilege for publishers and broadcasters providing information of broad public interest, as a basis for the committee’s amendment.

It’s notable that this 1999 legal manoeuvre has since been replaced in the UK by the Defamation Act of 2013, which clarifies the grounds for qualified privilege and offers clearer yardsticks for establishing criteria for adapting the defamation law to one meant to measure the public interest value of information of questionable provenance. In the time that the Cybercrime Bill has been in deliberation, there have been dozens of leaks of global information, with WikiLeaks alone curating 81 distinct caches of digital information.

This is a fast moving, rapidly evolving situation and one which is complicated by the increasingly diffuse idea of journalism and reporting, which had drifted out of the relatively polite and responsible realm of the traditional newsroom into wider, less informed use using tools with instantaneous global reach.

It might be further noted that it was under the umbrella of parliamentary privilege – “ which is far broader and more encompassing that any protection that an adapted Reynolds defence offers” – that former Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley introduced e-mails into consideration by the esteemed members of the House in 2014. Clearly the political leader of the PNM thought that using privilege to air matters he considered to be of national interest was a good idea.

One imagines that before facing Parliament, he might have been moved to agree with the general principle that the business of journalism is the sourcing and packaging of information in the public interest for wide dissemination and consideration.

It’s important then for the Government to be thinking, not just about the journalists who represent the voices and immediate face of these issues, but about the business of journalism, which increasingly represents a Fourth Estate of engagement between government and an electorate which is participating in digitally enabled conversations in growing numbers.

Journalists often come into conflict with politicians, but there is a good reason for that. Despite an occasional mask of consultation, politicians generally govern by edict and decree, offering up the legislation that manages our governance process through a system that defies casual attention and implementing it with an obscurantist’s disinterest in meaningful engagement.

Politicians can get away with seeing their constituents once every five years and offering up vague platitudes during such engagements.

Journalists meet with their constituents every day, engaging in conversations that are increasingly activated by responses that are livelier and more direct than the passive old days of the letter to the editor.

The business of journalism is no longer the exclusive province of the journalist.

Trinidad and Tobago, like most of the societies of the Caribbean archipelago, has been programmed to be polite and accepting for centuries.

Good citizens accept and honour authority and respond poorly to the perceived rudeness of defying leaders and questioning their motives and projects.

But good journalism is all about the backchat, particularly the informed response that demands acknowledgement by those who confuse leadership with service.

Our laws should respect that role.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there