Abstract
Journalists in war zones may need to ignore technology and go back to old ways of avoiding surveillance, says award-winning foreign correspondent
ABOVE: Reporters in Yemen face challenges from the security forces as they research stories. Police and army troopers patrol a street in Sana’a
Credit: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Westerners have been banned from travelling to Hadhramaut since 2012. Almost as soon as we arrived in Seiyun in the north of the province last September, after a seven-hour drive from the city of Mukalla on Yemen’s southern coast, I managed to get on the wrong side of the regional head of security. It was then I realised we had a choice: flee or face arrest. I chose the former.
As our small party of three – me, the driver Ibrahim (a pseudonym to protect his identity) plus my friend and fellow journalist, Shuaib al-Mosawa – bolted, I ordered all phones switched off and batteries and SIM cards removed. We had multiple military checkpoints to get through. There was little point in skulking through the night, me as a Yemeni woman covered head to toe in a black abiya and all-concealing niqab face veil, with Shuaib and Ibrahim as my male “relatives”, only to give our location away to either a passing drone, or Yemen’s intelligence agency, the US-backed National Security Bureau (NSB).
Encrypted email is now a basic requirement and simple counter surveillance measures are essential tools
It is a given in Yemen that the NSB listens in to the telephone conversations of all journalists. But, if the false trail we had left worked, they should think we were tucked up in our hotel beds rather than hunting for petrol in the middle of the night before retracing our steps and heading back on the road south.
Today, the most persistent threat to journalists in conflict zones is as likely to be from government agencies, often, such as Yemen’s NSB, possibly with the active assistance of government agencies of the foreign nations we hail from.
Whether you are in the middle of the desert in Yemen, on the streets of Cairo or in your home in Texas, as the American journalist Barrett Brown learnt, if your reporting is critical of the state, or you just dig too deep, you are inviting the wrath of government authorities. The consequences can vary, from jail, through deportation and being added to a government blacklist, to threats on your life.
Not wanting to doze off and leave Ibrahim driving alone, and once I knew enough miles were between us and our unwanted trackers, my mind started to wander towards money. I began calculating in my head what our run-in with northern Hadhramaunt’s security director was going to cost. Two to three bits of work lost and a pointless 14-hour drive through the desert made it an expensive error.
As a freelance, with no one to cover expenses, you pay dearly for mistakes when local security forces prevent you from doing your job. Aside from the threat posed by being caught, a particular danger for my Yemeni travelling companions, I would pay out my own pocket for the blunder.
Shuaib’s day rate for translation, and the pitiful amount Ibrahim was charging for driving us in his taxi almost the full length of eastern Yemen and back, made this a US$450 excursion with nothing to show for it.
The stories I would have written from these three days’ work would have more than covered my costs, but now I was left with empty hands and empty pockets.
I cursed myself, then the security director who had kicked up all the fuss and sent his soldiers after us, and then the state of an industry that had me, as a consequence of the lost income, working at somewhere under five US cents an hour for my troubles; troubles which still included the very real possibility of all three of us being arrested. We were also breaking one of my golden rules in Yemen: never travel in remote rural areas by night. Even if we avoided being detected by the security forces, a drone strike on the road back was not implausible, nor was being ambushed.
From the back seat I tapped Ibrahim on the shoulder and only half-joking said: “Don’t drive behind any other vehicles. Especially not any Suzuki Vitaras” – the regular vehicle of choice of Yemen’s al-Qaeda militants. He smiled a leafy-green, qat-filled grin – qat is the mild narcotic plant chewed by the majority of Yemenis whose stimulating effect was essential to get Ibrahim through the night’s drive without falling asleep at the wheel. “If we find Nasser al-Wuhayshi do we get a reward?” he chuckled, referring to the infamous leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Governments going after journalists is nothing new. But what is increasingly apparent is that those listening and watching when we work in countries infamous for their consistent stifling of freedom of speech and obstruction of a free press, are often doing so with the infrastructure, equipment or direct support of supposedly “liberal” Western nations.
As reports by the online news platform The Intercept, set up by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, note: “The US government shares its watchlist data with local law enforcement, foreign governments, and ‘private entities’.” Once the US government secretly labels you a terrorist suspect, other institutions tend to treat you as one.
In Yemen there has been occasions when journalists and activists have fallen into the “terrorist suspect” category. Washington’s involvement in keeping Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye – jailed for three years until his release in July last year – was revealed in information, released by the White House in February 2011, that detailed a phone call between the US president and his Yemeni counterpart during which President Barack Obama expressed his “concern” at his pending release. Consequently Shaye remained in solitary confinement for another two and a half years.
Last September Baraa Shiban, the local representative for Reprieve, who has extensively gathered evidence from US drone strikes in Yemen, was held under the 200 Terrorism Act at Gatwick Airport while he was on his way to speak alongside me at a Chatham House event. We were due to share a panel discussion on, ironically, Yemen’s security.
It would be naive to assume that the list of journalists and activists who have ended up on America’s extensive watchlist would only include these two individuals. Though Western states like to stand on the moral high ground, the US government’s example to the world on how to deal with journalists who seek to challenge the official narrative is far from exemplary.
A US drone buzzing over your head while you interview drone-strike survivors reminds you who is watching
Under the current administration the United States “model” has seen Obama’s justice department directing a record number of prosecutions relating to leaked information. It emerged last year that the phone records of 20 Associated Press journalists were secretly obtained as part of an investigation into apparent unauthorised leaked information used in a March 2012 story about a spy in AQAP who foiled a terrorist plot.
In Yemen, if strange sounds on your phone line are not enough to heighten your paranoia, a US drone buzzing continuously over your head while you interview drone-strike survivors and victims’ family members – as happened to me on one reporting trip last year – should be enough to remind you who is watching and who you should be afraid of.
In addition to the surveillance tactics, the rush for control and manipulation of information has reached a frenzy under Obama. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations we know that Britain’s agencies have also played a significant role in the manipulation and falsifying of information, or “the art of deception” as British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) called it, in order, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in his reporting, “to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse”.
Until encrypted mobile phone communication becomes more affordable and commonplace, we may have to go back in time – meeting in person rather than leaving a data trail
Mitigating the risks posed by government surveillance and attempts to control information is not expensive, compared to buying a flak jacket, or paying for hostile environment training, which gets editors and penny-pinching media organisations off the hook.
Primarily the onus falls on the journalists to judge how sensitively their communications – whether by phone, email or other increasingly popular social media tools such as WhatsApp – need to be handled. A balance has to be found between a disregard for communications security and histrionic paranoia when it comes to the clandestine threat.
But being caught in the middle of a fire-fight, a journalist is going to be much more conscious of being exposed without body armour and a helmet than when he or she is on GChat exchanging information with a source or discussing reporting plans with an editor via email without encryption. What should not be forgotten when working in conflict zones is that the hidden threat of government surveillance is as real as the visible one from bombs and bullets.
Technology, even something as simple as a mobile phone, makes journalists’ jobs easier. But it also makes the job easier for governments who seek to control and surveil us. One of the many things we can learn from the Snowden files is that doing nothing to protect our sources and ourselves from intelligence agencies will, in turn, make all our jobs more difficult. By discounting the need to change the way we work and carrying on regardless we play into the hands of governments who benefit from knowing much more about us and our activities when we are trying to find out more about theirs.
For now, until encrypted mobile phone communication becomes more affordable and commonplace, we may have to go back in time – meeting in person rather than leaving a data trail behind us. Failing that encrypted email is now a basic requirement and simple counter surveillance measures are essential tools.
As the gallows humour mantra of today’s journalists, taken from the 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, goes: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
