Eyes Wide Open for Disinformation

Disinformation and propaganda disguised as truth constitute more than a minor threat to social and political stability. This has been found to be so everywhere such practices are evident.

Responsible authorities and non-state institutions have been keeping a sharp eye on this, within the context of the use of new and social media, for about two decades now. Free expression rapporteurs from the United Nations, Europe, Africa and the Americas have issued more than one joint communiqué on the subject. There is also a lot of literature on traditional propaganda campaigns and how they work.

In the meantime, there is a growing body of direction on how this problem can be significantly dealt with – particularly when it comes to addressing the quality of traditional and new media audiences – without substantially threatening free expression.

The basic modus operandi behind the most recent versions of this phenomenon are now well known and understood and the direction flows of such information are becoming easier to track.

We know that both elements supportive of governments and those in opposition are routinely co-opted to facilitate and to enhance flows of disinformation. There are also non-state private actors that may for a number of reasons attempt to sway public opinion on a variety of matters, some criminal in nature.

I have repeatedly argued in fora examining such issues that a primary, durable intervention would be to focus on improving the discerning eyes and ears of receivers of news and information. “Media and information literacy” is the fancy term employed by development people nowadays.

Let’s break this down a bit and assume someone in a Whatsapp group posts a social media message ostensibly emanating from a senior police officer.

Let’s also say there is reference to a “Home Affairs” department of government and “upcoming elections” in the country.

What we would need are people to start asking some basic questions and to apply a more naturally sceptical pre-disposition. Firstly, do we have a “home affairs” department in T&T? Secondly, what “upcoming elections”?

Then, armed with an abundance of scepticism, portions of the message from your inbox can be entered into a search engine or one of several websites now used to identify “fake news.” Snopes is an easy one to use.

Voilà! “Home Affairs” and “upcoming elections” together with other key terms used in the Whatsapp message will yield an October 17, 2017 missive from South African officials regarding ANC leadership elections there last year – replicated almost word for word in the Whatsapp message. Takes a few minutes.

The next, slightly more difficult exercise, would be to work out ‘who’ might be behind what appears to be a coordinated effort to generate panic and concern about a visitation from some “home department” to verify elections-related information.

Many times, the person who innocently posts clearly bogus information on the group, would try to later diminish the potential harm by stating that such information can serve as a useful warning about the possibility of fake state operatives making the rounds.

Inquisitive sceptics (a condition to which some journalists are prone) would then position the finding alongside prevailing disinformation on, let’s say, the application of the property tax - to cite one possible, non-exclusive lead - and a variety of complementary online resources, including shady “news” outlets and supportive Facebook groups and pages.

Now, be clear, there is an essential difference between misinformation and disinformation. What online propaganda campaigns do is promote intentionally false (and often malicious) information through the use of people and channels that have the potential to innocently disseminate false information to wide and diverse audiences.

Additionally, one of the other main features of coordinated campaigns of disinformation is the effort to weaken the value of countervailing, authoritative sources of authentic information, of which the so-called “mainstream” mass media are but one.

It is therefore not surprising to often witness a high level of hostility toward and slurs directed at journalists and their media houses by politicians and their surrogates. This has been proven to be the case up North.

It’s almost axiomatic that disinformation campaigns embrace attacks on journalism and individual journalists. What is needed is a mainstream and social media consuming public that more readily diagnoses some pretty self-evident symptoms. Keep your eyes wide open!

(Originally published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian)

My Country's Great Hope

The great hope of youth in pan - (not about journalism) first published in the T&T Guardian on February 7, 2018

* Panorama is the annual competition involving steelbands from all over the country. It is keenly contested with strong community support.

Every year, at Panorama competitions, we hear the best steelbands in the world playing arrangements by the greatest arrangers on instruments blended by the leading pan tuners anywhere on the planet. On the instruments are the best players interpreting songs that could not have been composed anywhere else.

In defiance of assertions even from the people who manage the steelband movement, the young are streaming through the creative gates – as players, composers and arrangers. We perhaps also need greater interest in pan tuning – a lucrative pursuit with fewer than 100 competent tuners operating professionally worldwide. Yes, worldwide!

Why then can’t we concede that pan, in all its aspects, is the best thing we do in T&T and that we need to work much harder on activating its inert potential as a social and economic good?

It’s almost like the point I made about street food entrepreneurship in T&T a few weeks ago – that familiarity and commonness have conspired to generate private and official contempt.

I recall a discussion I had with the late, great journalist Keith Smith as we walked along Independence Square in search of snacks around 1986 or 1987. “Keith,” I said. “Don’t you think we should stop focusing on oil (natural gas wasn’t as important then as it is now) as the main driver of the economy and pay greater attention to the economic value of pan?”

Silence. Then the terse response: “You think people will take anybody on with that?” It was a response that belied his well-developed views on the instrument as an agent of positive social and economic change, but also pronounced, albeit provocatively, on the question of how we perceive of national development and the factors that drive it.

Far more eloquent expression and a much better conceived formulation of such an argument would later come from public intellectual, Lloyd Best, who argued that the panyard offered a space capable of delivering service both as an “economic zone” and as “an education plant.”

Best, of course, was all the while conscious of the fact that deep-seated prejudices existed then, as they do now, against the steelband movement, based on nonsenses about which I constantly remind people in this column from week to week – the supposed “failed” status of one group, the need for urban, middle class validation etc. and so forth.

Arima Angel Harps arranged by 23 year old Aviel Scanterbury

Very little of this has to do with Carnival per se. In fact, a valid argument can be advanced to suggest that Panorama can have a stultifying impact on the development of the instrument – all things being equal. There is also a strong case to support the view that increasing the platforms for delivery of a greater variety of musical genres will have a positive impact both on its economic prospects and on the creative values that drive the instrument’s development.

The growing involvement of young people in the culture of pan brings cause for great confidence, but is problematic because it runs against the grain of the established developmental orthodoxy of our time which grants limited space for innovation and the dimensions of human interactivity that never existed before.

I constantly make the point among old-stagers like myself that there is no comparison between the analog disciplines of our time and the digital reality of today. This is important, I believe.

Today’s young people occupy dimensions provided by digital space we 50 and 60 and 70 year olds never dreamt of in our youth (I turn 60 this year). The mindset is different. There is nothing obsessively linear about their thought processes or in how they conceive of the things they create.
They are capable of occupying time and space in ways we never thought possible.

For this, our society applies punishment and estrangement instead of encouragement and reward.

The young music arranger brings riffs, melodic twists and harmonies to his/her craft that are borderless and defy the parameters of the judges’ traditional score sheets. Too close to Panorama finals to get into the details, but I have noticed the slow but changing tide in favour of the new.

At the semis a week and a half ago, two journalistic colleagues confessed to their tears when the first bands entered the Panorama stage. This drew my own admission of overwhelming joy and hope and the trickles that run down my own cheeks.

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.