Bloggers, Blowers and Leakers

If this were the BBC’s Have I Got News For You programme, now would be the time for the odd-one-out round. Your four are: Prince Harry, Dell Computer, HSBC Bank, and a Cadbury’s Wispa bar.

The odd one out is the Wispa bar. It disappeared from the shelves about four years ago in the face of declining sales, but online petitioning by the sweet-toothed persuaded Cadbury’s to bring its chocolate bar back, at least for the time being.

Blown by bloggers
For Dell, on the other hand, online consumer campaigning was a far from pleasant experience. Angry customer Jeff Jarvis described on his blog, Buzzmachine, his frustrations with his malfunctioning Dell laptop and the company’s customer support.
According to the BBC, his postings attracted hundreds of responses and inspired comments by other bloggers. The whole affair influenced public perceptions of Dell to such an extent that market researchers concluded the company had sustained long-term damage to its brand.

Prince Harry was outed as being on duty with the British troops in Afghanistan by US blogger Drudge. Drudge’s other claim to fame, you may recall, is his exposé of the personal development activities of Monica Lewinski.

In Prince Harry’s case, I find myself in a quandary. There is something to be said for letting the lad do a useful job that he clearly loves and is good at, so long as the whole story comes out once he’s safely back home and those around him in Afghanistan are no longer prime targets as a result. But that’s very much the exception that proves the rule.

My favourite blogging story of the lot concerns the display of raw student power against HSBC Bank. The bank lured students with the promise of free overdrafts, but then changed its mind and started charging them just when they thought their overdrafts would tide them over the summer break between leaving university and starting work.

This time it was the mighty Facebook that floored the bank. Thousands of stu d ents threatened to boycott HSBC and, faced with losing large numbers of potentially lucrative long-term customers, it caved in.

So the odd-one-out rationale is that they have all been forced to change what they do by bloggers, but only the Wispa bar is a good news story. Or, if you prefer, they’ve all been forced to stop doing something by bloggers, except for Cadbury’s, which was forced to start doing something again.

Whistleblowing has been given a huge boost by the internet. And I’m happy to say that, generally speaking, blowers and leakers seem to be doing pretty well.
A year or so ago, the courts upheld a claim of unfair dismissal in the case of an employee of Waltham Forest College in London who had been sacked for whistleblowing.

The court said that he didn’t have to prove that a criminal offence or other illegality had taken place; all he had to do was reasonably believe that it had; then, of course, he could act on that belief. In fact, the court went on to say that the aim of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which provides for “protected disclosure”, was to encourage responsible whistleblowing.

To help leakers and bloggers further, there’s also now a legal threats database (citmedialaw.org/database). A US initiative, from the Citizen Media Law Project, which is affiliated to Harvard Law School, it supports citizen journalists by cataloguing the growing number of lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters and other legal challenges faced by people engaging in free speech online.

And last of all on the subject of corporate secrets, there’s Wikileaks. Set up just over a year ago by volunteers from a number of countries, it’s a whistleblower’s equivalent of Wikipedia and recently scored a big hit (see box on page 12).
A leak is like toothpaste: once it’s out of the tube, you can’t get it back in again. Or as the judge in the Wikileaks case said: “When the genie gets out of the bottle, it’s out for all purposes.”

Government, too, has its fair share of secrets that could benefit from unmasking. So we should perhaps give the present Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the credit for commissioning a rethink of the rule that keeps the record of discussions in Cabinet secret for 30 years.

Intriguingly, one thing that apparently prompted the review was the growth of government websites. The National Archives, which is managing the consultation, says that such sites have contributed to an expectation of open government.
However, the very powerful team Brown has appointed for the review has been specifically instructed to consider issues of prioritisation and cost. What cost? Storage and distribution costs are plummeting, so cost can hardly be an issue. And prioritisation implies that some kinds of access may lose out.

Another injustice the Prime Minister says he is addressing is allowing ministers to see official statistics before the rest of us, which gives them time to think about how to spin them before the journos come looking. They used to have a full five days to get their story straight, but that’s now down to just 24 hours.

It’s something, but it’s not enough because ministers still have the final say on these pre-release arrangements. And what Brown has changed for the better, subsequent governments could change for the worse.

So there are real grounds for worrying that, however radical the initial proposals, rulers will always find a way to water them down. An example is MPs’ attempts last year to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act.

This was the objective of a squalid little private member’s bill from Tory MP David Maclean. Those aren’t my words, incidentally, but those of Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrat leader in the Lords. And it was their lordships who chucked the bill out.
Maclean’s bill rested on the dubious premise that MPs’ correspondence shouldn’t be subject to the Freedom of Information Act because individuals might be identifiable from it. Maurice Frankel, the tireless head of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, told MPs that if that was the case, then the correspondence would already be exempt from freedom of information laws because disclosing it would be a breach of the Data Protection Act, which protects individuals’ privacy.

Meet the emasculators
But the bill had the support of some high-profile ministers, including the current Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and Jack Straw, at that time Leader of the Commons, who attacked a public servant, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, for “undermining” parliament’s intentions.

One thing we should do is offer whatever support is possible to the Information Commissioner ­ yes, the same one Straw accused of undermining parliament. Thomas has boxed particularly clever recently, and seems to have seized his opportunity from the loss of HM Revenue & Customs CDs containing all those child benefit details.

It was a happy accident that Thomas and his deputy Mark Walport were summoned to appear before the all-party Justice Committee of MPs just as the government had to own up to an embarrassing string of revelations about the loss of personal data on millions of citizens. Thomas went for the jugular, accusing successive governments of not taking data protection seriously.

A short while later he ordered the Cabinet Office to disclose two sets of minutes relating to the Attorney General’s advice on the legality of the Iraq war. He did it just at the time Brown’s independent experts were looking at the 30-year rule for the release of Cabinet papers anyway.

Stories such as these have huge implications for many information professionals, certainly for the media librarians I had the privilege of addressing in honour of Justin Arundale, but also for people working in many other contexts as well.

To be fair, we have to excuse those information professionals who work for the great academic institutions, departments of state or public library communities. In their case, issues of professional neutrality rightly apply.

But plenty of others work not just for the media but for campaigning bodies of one kind or another: pressure groups, associations, charities, non-governmental organisations. And when these kinds of organisations work well and genuinely in the public interest, they are a tremendous force for progress.

Lots of the secrets that people harbour are private: concealing adulterous affairs, taking bribes, caching the proceeds of crime. But government and corporate secrets are matters of record, and can be unearthed through blogging, leaks, and use of the Freedom of Information Act.

Private secrets are the proper stock in trade of campaigning organisations and investigative journalists. But when it comes to public secrets ­ manifestations of the secret state ­ that’s surely where information professionals come in.

The Freedom of Information Act is turning into a powerful weapon in the public interest, despite the best efforts of our lawmakers to emasculate it. Surely the most useful people to learn its intricacies and proactively exploit its full potential in support of campaigning issues or journalistic phone and leg work are information professionals.

By the same token, business can no longer be confident of covering up its misdeeds and presenting a well-spun message of reassurance to a dispersed and unorganised consumer community. Anyone can now publish globally. Abuses can be exposed and consumers can end up with a more powerful voice than that of corporate PR because the public is more likely to occupy the moral high ground.

Lend a hand
But a little bit of help from the established media and campaigning organisations to make their voices better heard never goes amiss.

Again, it’s information professionals who should be keeping a close eye on the more obscure reaches of the blogosphere and tipping the wink to campaign spokespeople and journalists, who can use their skills to turn individual injustices into issues of public interest.

Now that’s exactly the kind of value many specialist information professionals add already, to the best of their professional ability. But what about the passion?
Do you get riled and angry at deviousness and abuses of the kind discussed here? Do you ever say to yourself: how dare they?

And when a campaigning organisation or journalist, in pursuit of some wrongdoing or injustice for which there is documentary evidence, says of whoever it is: “Right, let’s get them this time,” what do you do? Do you remain aloofly neutral behind your code of professional ethics? Or do you say: “Let’s get them!” too?

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