While we are cooperating with police, we have expressed our grave concerns over the risk that our sources for the report may be identified. We protect our sources at all costs. It is a code that cuts to the heart of everything we do as journalists. It is about trust. It is about ethics. If the sources for this report are identified through the police searches, even inadvertently, it will be a dark day for journalism.
The Age discovered, via a whistleblower, that the ALP [Australian Labor Party] was collecting and storing personal information about members of the public, unbeknown to those individuals, and we reported, carefully and precisely, what those files contained without breaching any person’s privacy. The files included personal health and financial information – the sensitivity of which we respected.
The Age rejects any suggestion that its journalists have breached the law.
We also reject any assertion that The Age obtained or sought to obtain information on individuals that could be used at a later date. The Age sought simply to verify the claims from our sources about the extent and nature of private information held by the ALP and accessed by campaign workers and others. No one on the database was identified without their consent.
Related articles
- Victoria Police probe hacking claims (heraldsun.com.au)
- Op-Ed: Beware of ‘Surveillance by Design’ (business.financialpost.com)
- Police raid offices of The Age newspaper (news.ninemsn.com.au)
uppercaise 