Have you ever wondered how it is that the press can often get hold of information before the police? Are you curious as to how the media can be so quick to publish the details of the people in the news? The answer is simple. They employ the Dark Arts of Information Gathering. -they get the facts from government and commercial databases.

Let’s imagine that a newspaper needs confidential inside information to back-up a story that they’re writing on the founder of a multi-billion dollar IT empire. The newspaper has agreed to write the story to appease a friend of his who happens to be the business competitor of the ICT whiz-kid. The newspaper is run by an editor who has energy, drive and ruthlessness.

He assigns a reporter and tells him to get incendiary facts and figures to make sure the story about the billion-dollar businessman well and truly sticks.

How easy would it be to acquire this sort of material? The type of information that could severely cripple a business, possibly lead to millions of dollars being wiped off the value of the company, a bitter take-over bid and job losses.

Five years ago, it would have taken an age.

With old-style journalism, straightforward detective work might involve interviewing friends, family, company associates and enemies. It would probably mean several telephone calls to uncover the smallest fragment of information that could be of any use.

Newspapers are now faced with an unprecedented increase in competition, disappearing audiences, falling advertising revenues. Research that once took days must now be done in minutes.

This is why once-respectable newspapers are using ‘dark arts’ to get hold of material.

The favorite source of information is from corrupt police officers carrying cash bribes. Confidential data about crimes, suspicions, witnesses and victims of crime are quickly gained from computer networks that only they have access to.

As well as the police, many companies and organizations have databases containing sensitive information so it takes very little time to hammer out news ‘investigations’, once an obliging employee can be found.

No Defence Against the Dark Arts

The ‘dark arts’ today range from the hiring of private detectives to the use of elaborate snares and ‘honey traps’ and the bribing of almost any public official, civil servant or employee.

Reporters I have spoken to both on American and UK newspapers tell me that it is alarmingly easy to pay a person to open up access to huge governmental databases on which are stored millions of items of sensitive details such as national insurance, health records or financial information.

Criminal records are especially easy to obtain – allegedly. Those who are considered the best to corrupt are civil servants. Why? Because they are relatively poorly paid compared to their private sector cousins and their workload is often greater and less interesting.

Psst… want to buy a story, guv?

“If I didn’t file the story
or pay for information,
someone else would.”

One American national newspaper reporter who I’ve known for a number of years tells me how he researches a story – gone are the days of wearing out shoe leather.

“It’s all very elementary. All I have to do is telephone my contact, explain that I’m looking for such-and-such information, the person’s approximate date of birth, likely location, marital status and what data I’m looking for. In a matter of seconds all this information can be delivered to my email inbox or better still, because there’s no trace, told to me over the phone.”

“The private sector is probably worse and more lucrative than the public sector”

“One contact I know is fantastic. She can get me minutes of meetings, commercially sensitive data, home addresses of any employee, telephone numbers, next of kin details; she has even given me email passwords to a chief executive’s email address. Anything that can be used is used.”

“This stuff can be worth tens of thousands to people with reputations to lose but usually the newspaper I work on pays the informers a few hundred in cash, or takes them out for an expensive meal or anything, within reason, that they ask for. ”

“All I do is go away and file my story”.

“If the newspaper I work on targets a person, they will do it ruthlessly. Any phone number you’ve dialed will be found, every school buddy you ever had spoken to, everything spent on your credit card will be analyzed, and every illness you ever suffered will be looked at.”

Does it pray on his conscience that as a result, depth, context, objectivity, balance and accuracy are being sacrificed? Is he concerned that he’s commissioning a crime?

“You must be joking. If I didn’t file the story or pay for information, someone else would. Besides it’s an easy thing to do. There are so many takers.”

“I remember one story a couple of years back when it was a slow-news day. Two weeks previously someone had offered me a story about how easy it was to hack into US government computers. So I asked him to prove it for $2500. Within hours he had hacked into a database which held close on 500,000 names of service personnel which included both veterans and those on active-service. ‘The odd thing is that a spokesman for the US veterans agency denied that it had any data stolen because no one would be able to get pass their checkpoints system. We never did run the story. I learned later that the hacker was actually employed by the US Defense Department and regularly hacked into the federal government’s computer system and he still does it as far as I know.”

Susan Ashe who writes for several US newspapers says for her bribing insiders goes to the heart of what it means to be a journalist.

“The scoop has always mattered most, and journalists have long been rewarded for aggressive, clever approaches to getting it. And yes it’s true I’ve work at the dirty end of the street. The people I use in public and private organizations use an effortless stream of deceit, used as a first, not a last, resort to get the information I ask for.”

“But everyone in their journalistic career bribes someone at least once. Trade journalists do it as well and all reporters use disreputable methods to generate flimsy stories. Sometimes the only way to get the facts that are really stomach churning is to bribe people for data. And generally people who have access to electronic data are only too pleased to help.'”

If Ashe is right there may never have been a golden age of public interest journalism, but in the current news media revolution some of the basic principles underpinning good journalism are being lost.

To some people, modern journalism represents nothing but a smelly sewer of malpractice; it depicts a media universe rife with data rape, bribery, and wilful distortion but a small number of those who sell sensitive information to the media claim the classic public interest defense.

Take Jackie (not her real name) for example. She is a ‘Civil Servant’ who works for the UK Government.

She claims the reasons she passes information to journalists is to hold the people she works to account. She regards herself as a ‘Whistle-blower’

“The stuff I pass on helps journalists find, digest and distil information that helps the public form views and make decisions. How do I know, for example, whether or not I should give my child a multiple vaccination? ”

“How much should I worry about the H5N1 virus and should I take action? Is Iran about to develop a nuclear arsenal and, if so, what should we do about it? Is my mobile phone going to give me a brain tumour? Our world is increasingly inter-related and complex and we need news media that genuinely seek to explain, rather than frighten, hector or bully.”

What Jackie fails to mention with her passing karate-chop to the government’s integrity, is that she receives monthly ‘bonuses’ of several thousand pounds from a UK national newspaper because the inside information she gives that paper’s journalists is worth ten times the amount in the paper’s circulation terms.

Her anonymous ‘watchdog’ role she says is important to her not just for holding those in power to account, but because those in power recognize they’re being held to account; they just don’t know who’s supplying the critical information.

It is this sort of public corruption that the media fail to report because in the increasingly cut-throat and competitive media environment, news outlets are choosing to emphasize the subjective, the personal, the emotional and the sensational.

Liberty is Indivisible

Of course not all database theft is done for monetary gain.

Web publishing and wide-scale blogging has empowered millions more individuals and groups to take on the roles previously ascribed to journalists. They vary from environmental groups searching out information in the public interest, to individuals publishing secrets of corporate malpractice.

With all these distractions it is not surprising to discover that the public consumes less news, or rather consumes less news in depth and that’s why most media outlets are so desperate to buy up information that be readily turned into news

And you can entirely understand editors and proprietors for taking this course of action.

The greater public does wants only to consume news which is directly relevant to them, and screen out all the stuff that isn’t, by tailoring their RSS feeds, and viewing only internet sites and media outlets that conform to their view of the world.

Journalism almost slips away at the end, an afterthought.

Journalists invade data privacy even as they complain about government inability to protect it, One inescapable point about journalism is that, base or lofty, ruthless or idealistic, it is a mess, and always has been.

I don’t think we should entirely despair. The waters of both American and British journalism and those of most other countries across the globe certainly appear to be heavily polluted. But along with the tide of dead dogs and toxic waste, there do seem to be nutritious public-interest fish still to be caught. Liberty is indivisible, as the saying goes. And a free press is better than any of the alternatives. But that should not stop us campaigning for a clean-up.