The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/28/bolsonaro-attacks-show-why-reporting-on-secret-brazil-archive-is-vital/
Glenn Greenwald, Leandro Demori, Betsy Reed
Justice Minister Moro
and his defenders are trying to distract attention away from their own
misconduct by fixating on the actions of those who revealed it.
When news emerged this week that the Federal Police
had arrested four people accused of hacking the Telegram accounts of various
Brazilian officials and providing some of that content to The Intercept, many
of our readers asked: What effect will this have on the reporting that we have
done and are continuing to do on this secret archive?
The answer, in one word: none.
The public interest in reporting
this material has been obvious from the start: These documents revealed
serious, systematic, and sustained improprieties and possible illegality by
Brazil’s current Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro while he
was a judge, as well as by the chief prosecutor of the Car Wash investigation
Deltan Dallagnol and other members of that investigative task force. It was the
Car Wash task force, which Moro presided over as a judge, whose prosecution of
ex-President Lula da Silva resulted in his removal from the 2018 election,
paving the way for the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to become president. The
corruption exposed by our reporting was so serious, and so consequential, that
even many of Moro’s most loyal supporters abandoned him and called for his
resignation within a week of the publication of our initial stories.
As the revelations of corruption by
Moro and Deltan grew — reported both by us and our journalistic partners in
Brazil — those officials resorted to the tactics used by government officials
everywhere when their improprieties are revealed in the press: They tried to
distract attention away from their
own misconduct by fixating on the actions of
the source as well as the journalists who revealed their wrongdoing.
That is what Sergio Moro, exploiting
his position as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, has been
attempting to do for weeks. He and his defenders in Bolsonaro’s party constantly
speak about the alleged crimes committed by our source and imply that the
reporters and editors at The Intercept and other media outlets working with us
are criminals and “accomplices” for the role we have played in exposing their
corruption. Moro consistently refers to The Intercept’s reporters as “the
allies of the hackers.”
And on July 27 Bolsonaro directly
weighed in, with the scurrilous charge that Glenn Greenwald got married and
adopted children in order to avoid deportation (his marriage occurred 14
years ago); and threatening Greenwald with imprisonment with the line, “he may
take a cane here in Brazil.”
But despite their aggressive
efforts, Moro and his defenders have been unable to obtain any evidence to
support their insinuations that The Intercept did anything in this matter other
than exercise our right to practice journalism, which is guaranteed
and protected by the Brazilian Constitution.
At the end of last week, after
Brazil’s Federal Police had announced the arrests, they released what they
called the “confession” of the person they claim is the principal hacker who
provided us with this material, Walter Delgatti Neto. After being interrogated
for hours and allegedly “confessing” to the hacking, Delgatti Neto said in his
official police statement that:
·
he never spoke
to any Intercept reporter until he had already completed his hacking;
·
he never
requested or received any payment from The Intercept (or any other party) for
providing the documents;
·
he only spoke to
The Intercept anonymously;
·
he never altered
any of the chats he provided to us and does not believe that it would be
technically possible to have altered the chats given how he downloaded them
from Telegram; and
·
his claimed
motive for obtaining and leaking these documents was inspired by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden: to improve his country by exposing hidden
corruption that the public had the right to know.
Because we have not only the right
but the duty — under both the Constitution in Brazil and the code of ethics
that governs our profession — to protect our sources, we have not and will not
comment on the individuals accused by the Federal Police of having hacked into
Telegram accounts and then provided information to our journalists.
But what we can confirm is that, as
we have said emphatically from the beginning, the work we have done is classic
public interest journalism: receiving authentic information that reveals
serious wrongdoing by the country’s most powerful officials and then carefully
and responsibly reporting it. Even the Federal Police’s account of what their
suspect says aligns with what we have said from the start about our role.
When we published our first series
of exposés on June 9, we included an editorial explaining the journalistic
principles guiding our reporting of the archive and what our role was in
obtaining it. We wrote:
Until now, the Car Wash prosecutors
and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public
from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of
their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable:
For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors
were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening. …
The Intercept’s only role in
obtaining these materials was to receive them from our source, who contacted us
many weeks ago (long before the recently alleged hacking of Moro’s telephone)
and informed us that they had already obtained the full set of materials and
was eager to provide them to journalists.
When we received the archive, we
asked ourselves two questions, the same two key questions journalists around
the world ask when embarking on a story: 1) can we determine that this material
is authentic? and 2) is it in the public interest to report it?
If the answer to those two questions
is “yes” — as it was in this case — then we have not only the right but the
duty to inform the public about it. That is what we have been doing since June
9 and will continue to do until all of the material in the public interest is
reported. This is also why we opened our newsroom and archive to
Brazilian journalistic partners, including the major newspaper Folha, the
newsmagazine Veja, and others.
We were able to authenticate this
material using the same methods that at least six other journalistic outlets
used to authenticate it, many of which were the same methods used to
authenticate the Snowden archive before reporting on it. They include comparing
the contents to non-public material to determine that it was genuine;
consulting with sources whose non-public knowledge aligned with its contents;
and confirming with legal specialists that the highly intricate, non-public
legal material could have been created only by someone with in-depth, inside
knowledge of the Car Wash investigations. We were also able to see in the
chats the prosecutors’ past conversations with our own reporters, and we found
that they were authentic. The other journalists who had access to the
material did the same check and came to the same conclusion: The chats are
real.
If history is any indication, the
attempt by Moro and his defenders to encourage the public to fixate on the
actions of the alleged source rather than the content of our journalistic
revelations about his misconduct will fail spectacularly. Much of the most
important journalism of the last several decades was made possible by sources
who illegally obtained vital information and furnished it to journalists. What
history remembers is what the reporting revealed, not the actions of the
sources who helped reveal it.
In 1971, a former Pentagon official
Daniel Ellsberg stole tens of thousands of pages of top-secret documents
proving that the U.S. government was lying to the American people about the
Vietnam War. He gave those stolen documents to the New York Times and then to
the Washington Post, both of which reported them. What people remember are the
lies revealed by those stolen documents. To the extent Ellsberg is discussed,
he is widely regarded as a hero for enabling this official deceit to be exposed
by journalists.
Throughout the war on terror waged
by the U.S. and its allies since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the largest
media outlets in the west — the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News,
BBC, the Guardian — repeatedly received vital information from sources who
risked prosecution to expose grave wrongdoing, such as torture, CIA black
sites, and illegal domestic NSA spying. While a few authoritarian voices called
for the imprisonment of the journalists who revealed those secrets, most
regarded the reporting as vital and necessary, and all of those exposés
received the top prizes of journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize.
The same was true of the reporting
in 2013 and 2014 about the secret mass spying on the internet and entire
populations around the world by the U.S. government and its allies — reporting
that was enabled by documents unlawfully disseminated by the NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden. Dozens of media outlets around the world, including Globo in
Brazil, were eager to use those illegally obtained documents to report on the
secret spying by government officials because journalists understand that what
matters is not the acts or motives of the source but the content of what the
journalism reveals to the public.
And, of course, what history
remembers most about that reporting are not the moral judgments by the U.S.
government and its defenders about Edward Snowden’s actions. What matters —
what history has recorded — is what the reporting revealed about the mass and
indiscriminate invasions of privacy carried out in secret by security state
agencies.
We have no doubt that Moro,
Dallagnol, and their allies will continue to use the same tactics pioneered by
Richard Nixon and his top aides against Daniel Ellsberg and other sources
during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals: namely, to focus public
attention on the acts of those who revealed their corruption rather than on the
corruption they themselves committed.
But we also have no doubt that these
tactics will be no more successful in this case than they were in all these
prior cases of crucial journalism over the last several decades. What matters
to the public is what their most powerful leaders have done in secret. And
that’s why a free press is so vital, so indispensable, to a healthy democracy:
because only journalism that is independent of the government and unconstrained
by corrupt officials can ensure that the public remains informed and aware of
what their leaders are doing and that those officials are prevented from
carrying out corrupt acts in secret.
Those are the principles on which
The Intercept was founded in 2013. Those are the principles that have driven
the reporting we have done from the inception of our news organization. And
those are the principles that — with your help and support — will continue to
drive our ongoing reporting on the Secret Brazil Archive.
Wait! Before you go on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it
that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news
outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it? Consider what the world of media would
look like without The Intercept. Who would hold party elites accountable to the
values they proclaim to have? How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice,
and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters weren’t on the
beat? The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not
easy, cheap, or profitable. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news
outlet. We don’t have ads, so we depend on our members — 24,000 and counting —
to help us hold the powerful to account. Joining is simple and doesn’t need to
cost a lot: You can become a sustaining member for as little as $3 or $5 a
month. That’s all it takes to support the journalism you rely on.Become a Member
Secret Brazil Archive
A massive trove of
previously undisclosed materials provides unprecedented insight into
the operations of the anti-corruption task force that transformed Brazilian
politics and gained worldwide attention.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário