Age editor: identity of whistleblower at risk

 

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By Paul Ramadge, editor of The Age
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)

 

The Age raided after story on party database with secret personal info

If one had a nasty mind, the first thought would be this is dirty work by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch, prop.) getting one back on the competition, but there is no indication that is so. However the raid comes a month after the Sunday Herald-Sun, owned by News Ltd, had reported that police were investigating alleged hacking of the database. The Age, owned by News Ltd rivals Fairfax Media, had broken the story about the database in November last year.

Fairfax also owns the Sydney Morning Herald, and a string of other newspapers and broadcasting stations. News Ltd owns The Australian, the Herald-Sun in Melbourne and country newspapers across Australia.

News Ltd in the UK shut down its mass circulation New of the World after revelations that its journalists had hacked into private voice mailboxes of celebrities and other people, including the family of a kidnap victim. The phone hacking story, broken by the Guardian, resulted in a judicial inquiry that is continuing.

The Age is somewhat of an Australian counterpart of the Guardian.

 

The Age newspaper in Melbourne has been raided by state police over allegations the newspaper hacked into a database of the ruling Labor Party containing sensitive personal information about voters. But The Age said it had been provided authorised access by its source, a whistleblower concerned about the database.

Victoria Police searched reporters’ desks and spoke with editor Paul Ramadge and senior journalists and lawyers, the paper’s owners, Fairfax Media, said. “The police have served search warrants and are conducting searches in relation to The Age’s reporting of information on an ALP database prior to last year’s Victorian election.”

The database contained secret files on tens of thousands of people, which included sensitive health and financial information. The Age described how the database could be used to search voters by name, address or stance on particular political issues, and contacted a number of people reportedly listed about the information it contained about them.

Victoria Police told AFP their investigation was about an allegation that personal details were accessed without authorisation”.