I love the rule of law and the idea that politics is done morally, ethically, fairly, and justly without corruption, fraud, and lies, and I also believe that the law should be there to overall create a just society.
In my line of work and during my investigations I always procure my data and information legally, and the only contested case that I have on these matters is that of Yorgen Fenech’s chat leaks. I procure all my information from reliable and trustworthy sources who give me information in good faith and these people are mostly whistleblowers protected by the whistleblowing law. My sources are also protected by law.
I could if I wanted take the more profitable Wikileaks route and change my operation and start hacking people’s devices or receiving material from suspicious sources who work with bad intent. I could also scrape publicly available data dumps on the dark web and procure passwords of accounts of many individual MPs (you would be surprised to know how many MPs and other political or state VIPs use fake accounts for dating websites and whatnot). I choose not to, for many reasons.
First and foremost I believe in the rule of law and I think it’s the best and most preferred and just setup to live in, even though the Labour Party is taking this away from us. Secondly, I also feel a sense of responsibility to other people in the industry and there are some ethics and standards that I’d like to keep for the integrity of my business.
So, it’s not as if I’m trying to go viral and earn as much as I can, by publishing anything that I can possibly publish. My capabilities and propensity to publish random data, Wikileaks-style, are surely there.
I also have great respect for the judiciary because it is one of the last institutions of the state that has, as of yet, not been completely taken over by the Labour Party. I feel greatly privileged to have been born in a country where such an institution still exists because as a historian, and someone who has traveled and lived extensively abroad in various places, I know very well that not having a rule of law is really bad.
Yet, I don’t live in Japan either, and I’m not Japanese, and it’s not as if every source of seemingly independent authority is right all the time. So, I should be allowed to say, that Judge Edwina Grima is going over the top, and maybe has a misplaced obsession with leaks. What does the Judge really expect, that journalists wait for the likes of Brandon Pisani to know the news? The Judge seems to have a very PBS-like idea of what journalism should be about: like waiting for the government to issue a press release so that journalists have something to write about.
Consider this. For what reason is Police Commissioner Angelo Gafa having a monthly meeting with Judge Edwina Grima? Is this a monthly meeting on organised crime? On how many cases is the Police Chief meeting with a Judge to give a briefing on the update of an ongoing investigation? It’s absurd that of all the things that are going on in the Islands, the Judge is holding a special monthly meeting with the Police Commissioner on an investigation of NuxellinaLeaks. Apparently, Mr Ranger and myself are the subjects of this investigation.
I don’t know what else I can say, really, other than that the Judge’s antics are hilarious yet potentially very damaging to journalists who are simply just trying to do their job. As for my case, all I have to add to what I already said about it, may be this:
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply