Digital Security for Caribbean Journalists

Forum of Caribbean Community Media Partners

November 26, 2015

Hilton Rose Hall Resort and Spa, Montego Bay, Jamaica

It is one of the ironies of the modern era that our greatest technological assets are presenting some of the world’s more intractable challenges. It is, of course, possible to take the argument back to the impact of the Industrial Revolution in Britain during the late 18^th into the 19^th centuries and the emergence of a consumer revolution there which, in turn, helped galvanise and fuel the trade in slaves across the Atlantic right here in our lands where production for consumption in the colonial motherland was the primary activity.

I often follow discussions on what we have been calling a process of globalisation and wonder sometimes if people understand the extent to which our societies in these former colonial outposts have been a part of the internationalising of production, commerce and trade. Depending on the history class you attended, globalisation has been a feature of our lives centuries before the World Trade Organisation received its mandate 20 years ago.

I make this point to indicate that however much we consider ourselves immune or distant from both the benefits and the challenges of what the planet, its people and its resources have to offer the world is very much in us to the full extent that we are in the world.

When in 2013, therefore, Edward Snowden left his job at the National Security Agency in the United States and released thousands of classified documents to journalists, notably Glenn Greenwald of the UK Guardian, the subject of those leaks ought to have aroused the interest of people everywhere, journalists in particular.

Greenwald’s stories lifted the tightly compressed veil from a massive effort by at least two countries – the US and the UK – to coordinate efforts in a mass surveillance exercise the true scope and nature of which continue to unfold. One disclosure of not more than a year ago, for example, is that the NSA has been in the habit of monitoring every single mobile phone call being made to and from The Bahamas.

Whether we consider him to be a whistle-blowing hero or a traitorous criminal, Edward Snowden’s leaks welcomed a gigantic elephant into the room where we assemble to discuss the delicate intersection of privacy rights and national security imperative.

We will not be able to arrive at any conclusions here today, but we can certainly explore a number of dilemmas that confront us as media practitioners at different levels.

We have engaged a task which embraces two different seemingly contrasting processes. For one, our media have an interest in the shaping of an environment in which there is free and open access to public information. In fact, with very few exceptions, it is desirable that all publicly-held information should be available for accessing by all citizens including journalists.

On the other hand, we have an equally compelling motivation to resist intrusion into the conduct of our own professional affairs as journalists and, indeed, as citizens. Internationally, there are now organisations that work on uncovering surveillance practices around the world, and advocate for strong privacy protections.

This came home to Trinidad and Tobago when the government changed hands in 2010 and it was revealed that for at least eight consecutive years, the authorities had been compiling files based on the telephone conversations of labour leaders, social activists and journalists. This was followed by the passage of legislation which closely resembles an emerging menu of laws in developing countries dealing with official interception of private communications including emails, text messages and phone calls.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Interception of Communications Act prohibits such practices except in instances where there is a national security consideration or in instances where a crime punishable by 10 years or more in prison is involved. Within the first year of the new law, there were more than 250 reported interceptions – most of them linked to counter-narcotics investigations. We do not know how many convictions were achieved as a result. I suspect the figure would not be impressive. The state is not very efficient at prosecuting itself.

In Jamaica, a law bearing the same name has been in place since 2002 and was amended in 2011 to enable the authorities to disclose intercepted communications to other governments provided they meet set public interest stipulations. This followed the Manatt-Dudus Commission of Enquiry.

A closer look at this kind of measure merits another discussion at another time. But the point is being made that not all communications by citizens, among whom are our journalists, are, at law, subject to an absolute protection on the basis of the constitutional right to privacy.

But while governments are among the best resourced to execute such incursions into private communications, they are not the only ones. Both sophisticated international networks and petty cyber criminals are now known to be among the more prolific users of surveillance hardware and software in order to commit crimes including identity theft, cloning and other forms of fraud that are now known to contribute toward the commission of other crimes such as terrorism, the trade in narcotics and human trafficking.

Enter now the journalist. Not necessarily Greenwald with thousands of classified files courtesy Snowden, but perhaps an investigative journalist with the Jamaica Gleaner or Observer or Kaieteur News in Guyana or the Trinidad Guardian in possession of information that has the potential to shed light on the wrong-doing of public officials and thus help bring an end to corruption and other official malpractice.

Several challenges arise. For one, there is the question of protection of the source or sources of such information. There is no whistle-blowing legislation to protect people who wish to blow the cover on corporate or state malpractice, fraud and other wrong-doing in Caribbean Community countries with the exception of Jamaica with its Protected Disclosures Act which, of course, has to contend with the Official Secrets Act and its implications for disclosures related to information held by the state.

We have also witnessed a variety of legislative measures to address what our governments consider to be an exponential increase in criminal breaches online. It is understandable that the need to meet such a challenge through regulation is being treated as a matter requiring urgent attention, but there has so far been a tendency to legitimise official over-reach.

For example, Trinidad and Tobago’s longstanding attempt to introduce cyber-crimes legislation has been jeopardised by a fact common to other jurisdictions where new offences are being created in broad, uninformed terms that have the potential to capture otherwise innocuous online activities.

According to one analysis conducted by the Centre for Law and Democracy at the request of the ACM, there has also been a tendency to shift the onus unto users “to provide legal justification for activities which are only potentially harmful, instead of defining what is prohibited narrowly so as to capture only harmful activity.”

Much like the country’s Data Protection Act, a proposed cyber-crimes law in Trinidad and Tobago will have the impact of criminalising the otherwise innocent receipt of computer data by third parties, including journalists.

Similar challenges were experienced with respect to Grenada’s Electronic Crimes Act which essentially created an offence of “offensive” speech regardless of factual accuracy. The ACM joined with other organisations in condemning the law and arguing that the law could have had the effect of imposing a roadblock on information of public interest.

We have also argued that a public security justification for such laws ought to be precise and specific.

This might appear to be off the subject under discussion at this time, but it has a direct bearing on the ability of the authorities to legitimise incursions into both personal and corporate data sources. The threats to privacy and the integrity of journalistic data are thus, in this respect, subject to both open and surreptitious actions by the state.

So that, more or less, is the prevailing legislative environment and some trends in several countries. Some interception of private communication is permissible by the state under the law. Only in Jamaica is there a protection if the intercepted communication meets the standards set by the Protected Disclosures Act and the Official Secrets Act respectively.

The challenge now is how we operate within these parameters.

The irony is that the very technology that has become so useful to reporters in capturing and sifting information through digital means and has revolutionised the work of the investigative journalist, is what forms the basis for the development of surveillance software and other processes that provide access to the private information of media practitioners.

It is suggested that the rapid growth in the sophistication of such technologies owes much to a growing demand by governments to become more and more intrusive, often in pursuit of criminals but sometimes as part of an effort to gather information on the activities of political opponents and unfriendly states.

It has now become increasingly important for journalists and their news organisations to become more aware of the need to protect data and information and, very importantly, to protect their sources of news and information. Media development agencies are thus now working doubly hard to ensure that news organisations are equipped to counter an increasingly intense assault on the privacy of data and information received and stored by journalists and their organisations.

Awareness of this has in many instances impacted on the manner in which news sources now interact with journalists. In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the 2010 disclosures led at least momentarily to a much greater degree of reticence by journalists and their sources when it came to the sharing of information. Freedom of the press was, in essence, under attack not through guns or official oppression but by the intangible tentacles of intrusive technology.

The challenge has also emerged at a time when newsroom operations in most of our territories in the region are beginning to shrink with declining investments in areas not deemed to be of urgent concern. There is virtually no investment in anti-surveillance software and few efforts made to promote greater awareness among our journalists of the need to address the increasingly prying eyes and ears of the state and also of criminal elements.

This leaves a heavy onus on individual journalists to ensure the integrity of the information they receive and disseminate is protected. This ought to be supplemented by media outfits ensuring that all technical requirements are in place once such information reaches their networks. This can include protected file storage resources and other technical back-stopping.

It would also be important for journalists and other newsroom operatives to acquire an understanding of what is required in the conduct of threat assessments and the use of encryption tools. Some training will be necessary and there are several possible low-cost online options.

There are also several basic precautions that can be taken with respect to the two main communications instruments: your mobile phone and your computer – these days invariably a laptop or tablet. In a newsroom environment, there is likely to be a networked desktop computer.

Let’s first deal with your hand-held device. It is now widely acknowledged that your mobile phone is a virtual tracking device. People who want to know where to find you can do so through the use of simple apps and by simply using your mobile number. In countries where some journalists are at risk, they develop the habit of switching SIM cards to make it more difficult to be tracked and monitored.

Additionally, you need to bear in mind that with the tendency to store a variety of information including contacts, appointments, photographs and documents, you would need to ensure that your handheld device is secure in the event it is stolen or left carelessly around.

Then there is the web browser you use to access sites that might be of interest to you when researching your story or checking the balance on your bank account or making that airline booking or checking email if you do not use a separate app – activities that require disclosure of information that should remain private.

The fact of the matter is that whether you like it or not, your browsing history always leaves a digital trail, whether you have cleared your cache and browsing history or not. That “incognito” function on your Chrome browser might offer you a level of privacy with respect to casual users of your machine at the office, but does not erase data saved in the browser and your Internet Service Provider can still record all of your activities on the computer.

A growing number of journalists now use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which provide a high level of protection for personal information including your IP address, data exchange and browsing history by using an encrypted connection to the Internet.

You can also use a Tor browser which uses a network of proxy services to beat tracking of your browsing habits and reduce the ability of hackers to get hold of data exchanged via the Internet. Even well-resourced government surveillance agencies have reported difficulty with tracking data on clunky Tor networks that move slowly but work well to mask your online footprint.

Its effectiveness has however made it a prime tool for use by criminals of all shades and it is truly a double-edged sword.

Now, let’s deal with your webmail services. I once attended a digital safety workshop in Austin, Texas put on by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Well after registering for the workshop and sharing my Yahoo email address, the first presenter began by saying that using Yahoo mail is tantamount to leaving your car with the windows down and the engine running while you went away.

So, some of us switched to Gmail. Which is all well and good. It is recognised as being more secure than Yahoo mail and it works well. However, Gmail has now morphed into an integral part of the entire world of Google and your Google account. Outlook mail is considered relatively secure, except that as recently as last month, security experts picked up a vulnerability which leaves it as less than completely secure.

Increasingly, as well, journalists are using cloud file storage services not only as backup but as a primary platform for storing files. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Dropbox are among the most popular services. For the most part, these are generally secure services which encrypt your data while at rest. If you are concerned about the infamous iCloud hacks of last year, it was subsequently explained that the celebrities involved had been the victims of a concerted phishing attack through which hackers were able to secure log-in information.

There are also secure apps for instant messaging and for making voice and audio calls.

The brutal fact is that the best way to secure your data is not to use phones, tablets and computers at all. The bad guys, including snooping authorities, are at work morning, noon and night working on ways to find out more about you, for security, commercial and malicious reasons.

Journalists are particularly vulnerable not only as individuals, but as important links between sources of information and the audiences we serve. In the Caribbean, sufficient attention is not being paid to assessing the risks and taking action to mitigate their possible effects.

I would not prescribe a descent into systemic paranoia to which so many have already fallen prey, but would propose far greater caution than we have displayed within recent times.

Press Freedom Advocacy in the Caribbean - the plight of the volunteer

In the English-speaking Caribbean, press freedom advocacy is left almost entirely up to voluntary organisations and individuals earning their incomes mainly as working journalists or, depending on the circumstances, is left to media owners and managers responding to a variety of general regulatory requirements and specific threats to their individual media enterprises.

During the course of the Grenada Revolution of 1979-1983, oppressive media conditions in that country stimulated action by a cross-section of regional publishers led by Ken Gordon of the Trinidad Express with important support from newspapers in Guyana, Barbados and Jamaica. Except for regional responses to the state advertising boycott of Stabroek News in Guyana of 2007-2008, there has not, in recent years, been a similar instance of significant, concerted regional solidarity by newspaper publishers for each other.

There is, as well, no serious culture of human rights advocacy which positions freedom of expression as central to either civil political rights or as a pillar of economic, social and cultural rights. In fact, with few exceptions in Jamaica and Guyana, there can be said to be no functioning human rights organisation that has withstood the test of political incumbency.

The Bar associations of the region, together with the legal fraternity they represent, have failed the people of the Caribbean badly through their lack of active interest in this area of human rights.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the T&T Publishers and Broadcasters Association (TTPBA) has flown a generally consistent press freedom flag, together with the Media Association of Jamaica (MAJ) which has provided a sound platform for media solidarity in the face of industry-specific threats. But, apart from a floundering politically-volatile experiment in Guyana, through a Media Proprietors Association (GMPA), there do not exist concerted and cohesive efforts by the media fraternity to address press freedom challenges when they arise elsewhere.

The Curacao Media Organisation (CMO) which was recently admitted as a member of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) appears to be a hybrid association comprising both media managers and working journalists.

For the most part, the ACM has been the region’s premier press freedom advocacy group with critical support from its network of almost entirely voluntary organisations, some of which occasionally sink and emerge from significant organisational challenges.

There are current ACM-mediated “rescue” efforts in Antigua and Barbuda with respect to the Antigua and Barbuda Media Congress (ABMC) and the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT) while the Barbados Association of Journalists (BAJ) is yet to hold a long overdue general meeting and the Sint Maarten Media Association which had a promising start under Marvin Hokstam is now defunct.

The volunteeristic nature of all of these organisations can be said to be among their sternest challenges. Because both their leaders and members tend to be busy journalists and other media workers, little attention is paid, or is possible, to attend to the second most important element of the game which is the availability of money to keep things going organisationally.

In Latin America, still in recovery from the dictatorships of the relatively recent past, and with a much shorter history of democratic governance than the English-speaking Caribbean, organisations that pay attention to freedom of expression and press freedom tend to be full-time professional outfits funded by development-support and human rights institutions primarily from the developed world.

In the Caribbean, such international agencies, trusts and foundations have not recognised how possible it is to have long traditions of peaceful democratic life while at the same time confront serious attacks on the ability of the press to function in an unfettered manner.

There is the added difficulty of many international organisations not recognising the vital distinction to be made between the countries constituting the geographical area of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In fact, there are United Nations agencies that do not make the distinction and are quite happy to report on the state of affairs of “Latin America” as a region without reference to the Caribbean, notwithstanding official mandates to disaggregate the two distinct sub-regions. I can say a lot about this particular feature of some international inter-governmental institutions but won’t provide such a distraction at this stage.

It seems to me that the challenge of volunteerism in press freedom advocacy is how to combine the best features of working journalists intervening on their own behalf while maintaining a sustainable, professional environment to facilitate expression of their concerns.

This perhaps requires a re-thinking of current approaches to include some elements of the following:

1. That Caribbean media workers associations consider formal, legal incorporation as entities with the ability to conduct research projects, training programmes, fund-raisers and campaigns that earn them an income to meet recurrent expenditures on staff and secretariat space. This, of course, carries with it the burden of corporate obligations to prepare financial and management statements, pay taxes and take care of staff needs;

2. That the state and corporate sectors be encouraged to establish independent philanthropic trusts from which funding from such enterprises can be derived for institutional support of media associations. The funding mechanism developed for independent support for the Caribbean Court of Justice is a fine example of how this can be achieved;

3. That media enterprises consider seconding full-time journalistic staff over limited periods to serve on a full-time basis with media associations. This can be a meaningful contribution on the part of media owner and manager organisations in an area in which there is mutual interest together with media worker organisations;

4. That trade unions active in the media sector play a role in lending operational support to national media worker associations;

5. That the constitutions of national associations re-consider the trend toward longer terms of office for elected officials. The recent trend has been toward extending terms to a period of two years. It might be that such a term is too long and that executive committees require more frequent refreshing;

6. The issue of entitlement to membership should be debated to determine the degree to which new media and other entrants to the industry can be embraced;

7. That national media associations play a role in developing national level frameworks for media self-regulation;

8. That, in some instances, where the national media landscape is small and limited, consideration be given to merging the operational and institutional arrangements for representing both media enterprises and media workers;

There is little doubt that the ACM, as the umbrella organisation and international interface for the Caribbean media worker fraternity also faces similar challenges of its own. But many challenges are associated with the fact that too many national affiliates are dysfunctional, poorly funded entities driven by a few devoted volunteers.

Opponents of the free press are wont to gloat on such a parlous state of affairs. So too do uninterested media workers who have proven to be their own worst enemies.

National media worker organisations are absolute necessities in today’s world. Those that continue to function well against all odds are to be applauded. Those that falter and fall need much broader and urgent support.

The Caribbean Embrace of Censorship

I remain startled by the fact that so many Caribbean media practitioners and creative folk enthusiastically embrace official censorship and have a tendency to invite such intervention even when those with an interest in restraining free expression don’t initially appear interested.

It is true that free expression sometimes carries with it the hefty price tag of gross irresponsibility, atrociously poor taste and the incompetence of some communicators, but inviting the censors to do what ought to be achieved through self-awareness and self-confidence presents our societies with the worst possible remedy for authoritarian intervention.

There are several striking examples of this, one of which is application of intellectual property laws and regulations.

I believe we move into the dangerous terrain of criminalising speech and expression when we focus on increasingly draconian legislation to deal with the so-called “theft” of intellectual property. Strictly speaking, it’s not the property itself being stolen but the potential financial and other benefits of such property.

So, if you “steal” my poem and publish it as your own, I still effectively have possession of the piece, but am probably denied of any income derived from its subsequent sale as part of a collection of poems by someone else. Should a resolution of this be the arrest and detention of the “thief”?

This is what I confronted during a session at a recent workshop when journalists were practically imploring a chief of police to get involved in the “theft” of online newspaper articles.

Of course, the lifting of online journalistic content for either free or paid dissemination by someone who does not have a relationship with the writer is rather sickening.  I have been a victim of this many times. The practice has meant that as a freelance writer, I lose the opportunity to sell my stuff to a wider range of publishers when they can simply lift what I write for free from some other source – hopefully one that has paid me for my work.

What would satisfy me as the originator of the work would be some form of compensation for use of the article/s. I have no interest in a criminal prosecution. Neither should I. Such an approach invites law enforcement people to stand over the shoulders of everyone producing any kind of creative content.

By inviting the police to deal with this, instead of independent copyright agencies – who are also, hopefully, not greedy and dishonest as some of them are – who are staffed and trained to track, recover and punish those in the breach, we lose sight of the value of freedom to express ourselves freely and fuel the “big brother” aspirations of authoritarian leaders and officials.

The other area of concern is this thing about promoting indigenous creative content through coercion. Throughout the Caribbean there is this mindless hankering for official intervention to “save” what is called “local” content by legislating taste in the broadcast media.

In the first place, there is no sensible working definition of the term “local content” in much of the discussions I have heard on this subject. This is particularly so since, in the Caribbean, we have officially, through Caricom, sought to define a “we” in the context of the people who live in a defined social and economic space.

So under Caricom arrangements, for example, people, enterprises, goods and services are intended to eventually achieve equal status throughout the 15 countries that have signed the Treaty of Chaguaramas. This means that a (creative) good or service produced in Jamaica ought to have ‘domestic’ status in Grenada or Trinidad and Tobago or Guyana. The concept extends, in some respects, to other international agreements. But let’s focus on the Caribbean countries.

Some short-sighted, unenlightened musicians and other content generators in Trinidad and Tobago want “local” to be defined as “born, bred and resident in Trinidad and Tobago”. This nonsense belies the fact that some of our more outstanding performers reside outside of the country. The phenomenal David Rudder happens to be one. It also, more significantly, relegates the music of Caribbean icons such as Bob Marley and Eddy Grant to the level of “foreign” content outside of Jamaica and Guyana/Barbados (which one, Eddy?).

David Rudder the "foreigner"?

This defining of “local”, in turn, is meant to facilitate broadcast content quotas especially in the field of radio. In one instance, citing Canada as a shining example, there is a move to regulate no less than 50% “local” content.

Certainly, this not only contravenes basic conditions for freedom of expression but betrays an ignorance of the international agreements to which Caribbean countries have signed on to among themselves and with others.

How difficult it is to invoke the free expression perspective on these issues!

A more enlightened approach to the application of intellectual property law and a more sophisticated strategy to encourage high-quality creative Caribbean content will considerably help to establish the vital link between creative genius and the development process and not stifle the creative impulse.

New Year, Old Challenges

NEW YEAR’S STATEMENT – ASSOCIATION OF CARIBBEAN MEDIAWORKERS (ACM) PRESIDENT, WESLEY GIBBINGS

December 31 – Let me extend best wishes for a productive, safe and enjoyable 2008.

This network of journalists and media workers became six years old in November. Evidence that we fill a real void in the sphere of Caribbean media has come not only via the regional and international recognition we have achieved, but also through the sense of community we have been able to build.

For example, when we met in Trinidad, under the leadership of Dale Enoch, for our various meetings on December 4-6, there was a level of camaraderie and friendship our institutional partners in that exercise found inspiring and exemplary.

The thing is, we are in fact building a community of professionals along lines that defy the undoubted requirement to formalise and to install firmer organisational structures.

Though the latter imperative becomes the focus of our attention over the next two years, we would do well to continue deepening and widening the process of developing this community across borders.

Today, colleagues from Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, Haiti, Suriname, Jamaica, Grenada and Antigua & Barbuda sit on our executive committee – a design, unlike suggestions to the contrary, not contrived by any notion of territorial equity.

We have also done our work largely on our own with some help from friends who have demanded nothing more than the fact that we stay together.

Our engagement has not been time-bound by contract or project funding and there has been no single, exclusive financial benefactor. This means we have remained independent and free.

Our executive members have all contributed voluntarily to the work of the organisation – even though so many of us are freelancers with no fixed source of income.

Bert Wilkinson, Peter Richards, Deby Nash, Jerry George (SVG) and Michael Bascombe come to mind as they have all contributed selflessly to the cause as freelance journalists serving on our executive committee.

Bert, for example, had served on every single executive committee between 2001 and 2007, when he decided not to seek re-election at our last Biennial Assembly. His work in leading a one-person mission to Haiti in 2002 was a high-point of our early activities and is favourably remembered by colleagues there. His experience and skill as a journalist were also assets he brought to the process. Thank you, Bert.

We have aligned ourselves with the Rory Peck Foundation, based in the United Kingdom, which looks exclusively at welfare and safety issues associated with the work of freelance journalists. In 2004, for the first time ever, the ACM was able to convince the Foundation that natural disasters should be considered a source of professional distress for freelance journalists and the Foundation offered assistance in the case of Grenadian journalists affected by Hurricane Ivan.

The point was reinforced in Jordan when I attended the first Global Forum for Media Development in October 2005 and, together with Jean Claude Louis of Haiti, urged participants to consider that vulnerability to natural disaster is as urgent a matter for the small-island and low-lying coastal regions of the Caribbean as are the threats of political and criminal violence that specifically target media enterprises and journalists.

For example, the effects of the 2004 hurricane season severely disabled mass media operations in Haiti and Grenada and dislocated journalists and other media workers. Media-specific international aid resources should therefore extend beyond the current inclination to focus only on violence against media workers.

The coming year will see an ACM that is much more focused on matters of internal organisation and consolidation. We plan to become legally incorporated, establish a small secretariat in Trinidad, re-design and configure our web presence, regularise the processes for the acquisition of regional media passes, apply for formal membership of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX), which monitors free expression issues globally, and re-visit our constitution and code of ethics.

Several projects are also currently in the making. They include two online courses on Digital Media and Investigative Journalism. The Digital Media course should, in collaboration with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, be ready for offer by March. The long-awaited Investigative Journalism course should commence by July/August, we hope. These follow two highly successful exercises in 2005 and 2006 and a third, limited offering in 2005 in Spanish.

We are also compiling our State of the Caribbean Media Report II (2005-2007) and are currently awaiting submissions from Barbados and Jamaica. It is hoped that a draft will be prepared for submission at a workshop on Media and Governance hosted by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington DC on January 15, 2008.

Our Mentoring Programme for Young Caribbean Journalists is being developed and is being put up for project funding and should be launched early in the new year. Prospective mentors have been notified and we will soon begin pre-screening for a cadre of protégés for a pilot of this important project.

We are also developing a project to produce an Elections Handbook for Caribbean Journalists. The idea has already received favourable feedback from prospective benefactors and a team is being assembled to manage the research and production processes.

On the invitation of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), we recently submitted a prospectus for the staging of a regional media workshop on West Indies cricket designed for journalists who do not cover sport.

This forms part of our overall campaign to maintain contact with a variety of regional institutions and to establish our bona fides as a representative regional organisation. Such recognition is already extended by the CARICOM Secretariat and regional and international organisations active in the Caribbean. Some of these include: OAS, PAHO, ILO, UNESCO, UNIC, UNDP, IICA, CARDI, CTO and CEHI.

Similar initiatives are now envisaged for the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and CONCACAF.

In the meantime, we do not plan to take our eyes off the challenge of threats to freedom of the press.

We note with concern recent regulatory developments in Antigua and Barbuda - to be replicated, we understand, throughout the OECS - which have the potential to impose new levels of censorship in the broadcast media. The challenge of Trinidad and Tobago’s proposed broadcasting code is not dissimilar.

In Guyana, the continuing state advertising boycott of the Stabroek News is being viewed in the context of official action to stifle dissent and to punish recalcitrant media. Its impact on the practice of journalism in Guyana is yet to be fully examined, but the prospect of substantial reductions in advertising revenue will no doubt have the potential to steer media coverage along more conservative editorial lines.

In Jamaica, we need to keep an eye on proposed revisions to defamation legislation being considered by a multi-sectoral team which includes the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ). This is a move in the right direction but one that needs to be delicately negotiated to ensure that ad hoc reform of one branch of media law is not accepted as absolute acceptance of all other regulatory conditions affecting media. In the process, as well, we would expect that the Government of Jamaica also use the opportunity to remove criminal defamation from its statute books. This would set a highly positive precedent throughout the Caribbean and the Commonwealth as a whole.

Throughout the region, we also look forward to more consistent application of the freedom of movement provision of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which specifically grants such rights to media workers. The expulsion of Vernon Khelawan and Lennox Linton from Antigua and Barbuda earlier in 2007 provided evidence of a lack of commitment to the principles under which such a provision was embraced both by international treaty and domestic legislation.

CARICOM Skilled National Certificates as they relate to media workers are not being consistently recognised in the region. There are now media workers with skills certificates from more than one country. Certainly, this was not the original intention. To insist that media workers apply for certificates from their adopted countries, IN ADDITION TO certificates granted by their home countries is absolutely inconsistent with the original design of the free movement provisions of the Treaty.

I am amazed that more journalists have not taken this up as a valid story. It is a travesty and amounts to official sleight of hand to re-introduce the notion of a work permit. CARICOM countries need to decide whether they want this or not. The ACM did not participate as a member of the Advisory Council to the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on the CSME with this in mind and the current procedure does NOT have our blessings.

In collaboration with the International News Safety Institute (INSI), the ACM will work with SOS Journalistes-Haiti on the hosting of a workshop on journalistic safety early in 2008.

I also want to pay special tribute to our Assistant General Secretary, Guy Delva, whose work as head of the Independent Commission for Supporting Investigations into Murders of Journalists (CIAPEAJ) is already producing favourable results in Haiti.

Our work is cut out for us in 2008. Thank you for your support. Thank you, Dale, for an ACM that remains strong and united.

Making Sense of Noise and Hubris

Public relations advisors to the Jamaica Labour Party can be excused if they express some discomfort over the candour of their party’s General Secretary and Minister of Industry and Trade, Karl Samuda.

The spin doctors like keeping matters of strategy on the down-low, just in case. Just in case …

However, at a November 22 discussion on political advertising in 2007, hosted by the Mona School of Business, Samuda seemed to tell all about the party’s plan during the recent general election campaign to, among other things, clinically isolate People’s National Party leader, Portia Simpson-Miller, from the flock and then proceed to slit her political throat.

The strategy appeared to work.

“Timing was everything,” he said to a gathering of political pundits, a group of PNP partisans, pollsters, journalists, students, lecturers and other not so innocent bystanders.

I wondered then whether post-election Trinidad and Tobago had not meanwhile been preparing for similar introspection and open discussion on the conduct of the November 5 elections. I rather doubted it then and continue to do so.

By the way, none of the T&T party strategies of 2007 appeared to match the sophistication of the JLP campaign so that there would be no cohesive plan to reflect on in the first place.

The Congress of the People with all its MBAs and MPhils never thought that both Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday could have been extracted from their flocks for special treatment.

Panday, for one, is a far easier target than Portia. The PNM campaign which projected the “leadership” of Patrick Manning stretched his neck way out onto the chopping block. But the axe never fell at the hands of a highly vulnerable UNC, with its eyes on the Opposition benches and nothing else, and a faltering COP armed mostly with Excel spreadsheets and competently designed Microsoft Project files that told them they would win convincingly.

But who is leading the effort to collectively look back and reflect? To disaggregate the political advertising and attempt to make sense of what actually happened?

Who is measuring the contribution of state-funded media advertising to total advertising spend?

Will the media industry get together to discuss the ethical dilemma it confronted when media houses were invited to share in dubious partisan largesse? If it does not do so, media owners and managers will have great difficulty explaining to reporters that they cannot accept free phones or lunches in exchange for favourable stories.

An effort by John La Guerre and Selwyn Ryan of the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies back in 1996 sought to explore some of these issues following the election of 1995 (in the process granting me space in a subsequent UWI publication to write about Journalism and the Political Process during the General Election.).

Even so, the political parties had then sent low-level functionaries who clearly did not sit with the strategists who designed the respective campaigns. By contrast, in Jamaica last week, Samuda was there, together with Sharon Haye-Webster who was at the forefront of election planning for the PNP.

I am not sure a similar attempt is being made in time to analyse and record the ins and outs of campaign 2007 in Trinidad and Tobago. We have long moved away from reason on such matters. Radio and television noise and hubris undoubtedly prevail. But that is hardly an “analysis” of what happened.

This is not to say post-election “cas cas” has disappeared in Jamaica or that the “ro ro” of St Lucian elections almost a year later is done or that bacchanal is not about to reign in Grenada when they go to the polls next year. That’s par for the course.

But the Jamaicans certainly led the way last week in conscientiously trying to get to the bottom of pertinent issues excavated by a long, contentious election campaign.

I was not entirely impressed with the research presented by the Mona School of Business as it attempted to describe the nature and impact of political advertising during the campaign and I was very uncomfortable with the remote but distinct suggestion that such information be used to advise some kind of official policy on political advertising.

If as societies we need to intervene officially in such matters, we certainly need to be equipped with far better qualitative outputs than were presented at last week’s seminar. Otherwise, political advertising would lose the protection of free speech it needs to be effective.

But, who cares, really?

Jamaican Babies in Cayman

I have decided to stray a bit from the issue of press freedom in the Caribbean to draw attention to a tiny British colony in the Caribbean – the Cayman Islands.

I have been following developments in the territory more closely since the advent of Cayman NetNews and its attempt to function as an independent media enterprise in the midst of what appears to be an environment not conducive to such freedoms.

On October 2, 2007, a Jamaican woman called Shellesha Woodstock gave birth to a baby girl on board Cayman Airways Flight #600 en route to Jamaica as Caymanian authorities hustled, frantically, to ensure that the child was not born on Cayman soil.

Details of the attempt to get the woman out of Grand Cayman ought to have alerted human rights advocates to gross violations of the rights of the woman and her unborn child. But there have been few lines in the Jamaican press highlighting the issue and even fewer in the Caymanian media asking serious questions about the circumstances leading to what amounts to the ‘expulsion’ of Ms Woodstock in an advanced state of pregnancy.

Now comes news that yet another Jamaican woman, unidentified by officials, gave birth in the midst of desperate attempts to ensure that her twins were not born on Caymanian soil.

Caymanian health official, Lizzette Yearwood, is quoted in Cayman NetNews as saying the measure was necessary because “the level of expertise needed for the babies’ care is not locally available.”

One would therefore assume there has been a constant flow of Caymanian women to Jamaica seeking such care for their newborn. I would like to see the statistics. Surely, the same level of care sought for the Jamaican woman and her twins should be extended to Caymanian women.

Is it just me? Or is something very, very wrong with this picture?

How far can small-island parochialism go? How uncaring? How deadly can it become?

Those with a little knowledge of the Cayman Islands would know that it is Jamaicans who have helped, more than any other group including indigenous Caymanians, to develop the tiny British colony through their work in a wide range of fields – not the least being those jobs native Caymanians resisted doing in the early years.

Today, Jamaicans need a visa to enter Caymanian territory. In an inspired move, the former P.J. Patterson administration imposed Jamaica’s own visa regime on Caymanians wishing to visit the island.

It was unfortunate that the situation had to come to the stage of tit-for-tat diplomacy, but perfectly understandable that discrimination was met with firm action.

The same has not been true in the case of discriminatory immigration policies in Turks and Caicos, British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, where Jamaicans and Guyanese are not welcome.

How these countries remain evenly remotely associated with CARICOM is beyond me. Discriminatory immigration policies targeting Jamaicans and Guyanese deserve expulsion from the CARICOM circle.

To be fair to the Cayman Islands, they aren’t interested anyway, though they became an Associated CARICOM state in 1991. But what the hell are they all doing as part of the CARICOM process?

In any event, the Cayman Islands are one of the few countries in the world in which place of birth does not automatically signify citizenship or nationality.

The actions of the Caymanian authorities ought to be highlighted at the next CARICOM Inter-Sessional meeting of Heads with a view to securing the abolition of the current visa regime against Jamaicans. Same story for Turks and Caicos, BVI and Anguilla.

While I am on this subject I also want to ask the question: Why do Haitians still require visas to enter most CARICOM countries?

If we did not want Haitians among us, why were they invited to join CARICOM in the first place?

It is high time we get these anomalies out of the way. We are already seeing, courtesy the Cayman Islands, how callous and potentially deadly regional fiddling with an important issue can become.