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8:52 PM
zimbio
People in the t.c spend time exposing people who allegedly bribe government officials.
According to Wikileaks, which knows a thing or two about floating money laundering operations and whistle-blower anonymity, TCI's anonymous journalism...
... culminated in a dramatic UK governance takeover of the Islands on August 14. A trail of evidence dug up by the TCI Journal, a UK commission of inquiry, and others, showed that foreign property developers were giving millions in secret loans and payments to senior Islander politicians, including an alleged $500,000 cash payment to the Island's now former Premier, Michael Misick.
A litigious bunch, these developers also sued the commission and the T&C government to force it to redact the final commission report, blacking out their names. Not to worry, though: Wikileaks got a copy of the unredacted 266-page document and posted it online. The official redacted report is published at tci-inquiry.org.
Attorneys for the big developer have gone after the site's Web host and domain registrar, managing to take the site offline for a few days. Now they're attempting to wrest the owner's information from Google.
According to Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web, Google sent the Journal a letter warning that unless TCI sends Google a letter asking them to quash the subpoena, they have no choice but to roll over on TCI.
TCI is not the New York Times by any stretch. It's a tiny volunteer-run organization with cojones the size of coconuts. So in addition to reporting on government corruption, it's been publishing all the nastygrams it's received from Kinay's legal team -- which, of course, they also want redacted from the site.
Wait, it gets better. Someone calling him or herself "TCI Controversies" started the TCI Citizen blog at Blogger.com shortly after the unredacted report appeared. The blog's sole purpose seems to be trashing The TCI Journal. Of course, it's anonymous.
Someone (probably the same person, judging by the writing style) has also been planting anti-TCI Journal stories on sites like AllVoices, which will publish contributed articles from anyone without any human intervention.
Now I wonder if TCI Journal will sue Google to get the names of the folks behind that defamatory blog. Bet you 20 coconuts the authors have a more-than-casual relationship with those developers.
Attempts at suppressing negative press are hardly unheard of in this country -- corporations try to do it all the time (Steve Jobs, your iPhone is buzzing). Few of them pursue it so aggressively, though, or try to stomp out the sources of bad news. Whether The TCI Journal survives probably depends on whether they can afford to pay attorneys to protect them.
So this is why anonymity is important: Not so people can make nasty comments about anyone else just because they feel like it, but to help the little guys who are trying to serve the public and don't have the resources to protect themselves against corporate or government attacks. If Google can't or won't do it, someone else needs to.
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