14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that the Internet has been around for a while, the governments and industries of the world seem to have a difficult time grasping how things actually work.
This has been obvious many times over, starting with the entertainment industry asking Google to police the Internet as if the company removing a link from its search results would actually make it disappear completely.
The same has happened when governments have demanded journalists that copies of a digital file be returned. The most obvious instance of this occurred a few months back when British publication The Guardian was asked to destroy its hard drives that contained the Snowden files.
This, of course, happened despite the newspaper’s efforts to point out to the British government that the move would be pointless considering that the files were also stored somewhere else. This is, after all, the beauty of digital documents – the ability to have countless copies, stored on just as many devices, in the cloud, in emails and more.
Well, the Australian government seems to be joining in on the madness. Asher Wolf, a journalist from Australia working for the local branch of The Guardian was asked to return confidential information that had already been published.
The request that Wolf received demanded that she hand back files used to write a piece titled “Immigration Department data lapse reveals asylum seekers’ personal details,” which was published last week.
The article named in the request sent by the government was based on a document that was available on the website of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and which contained personal information of current and former detainees.
“The information was never intended for public release and is not otherwise publicly, or generally, available outside the department. As soon as it became aware of the inadvertent breach, the department took immediate steps to remove the material from its website,” reads the letter Wolf received.
She was then reminded that journalists should not obtain information by “dishonest or unfair” means, which, of course, is quite hilarious considering that any material posted on the Internet is public, and therefore, available for everyone to read and download.
The fact that the Australian government still hasn’t grasped this particular detail is mind boggling especially since the country’s spy agency practices a lot of online surveillance in partnership with the National Security Agency.
Then, the journalist was asked to immediately return all hard and soft copies of the information, including copies on any storage device in her possession or control.
Personally, I could only think of those instances where people with absolutely no grasp of how computers and the Internet work are surprised to find that they still have a copy of a file they’ve emailed to someone.
For her part, Wolf replied to the government, holding her position and pointing out the obvious – the file that The Guardian used to report the issue was publicly available. The newspaper even tried to protect the people whose names appeared in the file by not giving out its title or location, so that others didn’t find it easily.
Wolf closed her letter by saying that she didn’t know who downloaded the document or accessed the information and, obviously, she had no intention of providing the agency with any of her storage devices.
The file in question has since been taken down.
Regardless, it’s important for governments to start learning that when one of their agencies publishes a document by mistake, it still counts as it being publicly available. The people responsible for the error should be held accountable, but that’s an internal problem, not one that concerns journalists or anyone else who had access to the file.