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Journalist Burned Alive In India For Facebook Post Exposing Corruption
arnott writes: Journalist Jagendra Singh used a Facebook page to expose corruption in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. Though he posted under a pseudonym, he was quickly found and burned alive by police, allegedly on the order of the minister accused. He died a week later from his injuries. This is not the first case of a journalist being attacked in this state. Amnesty International had urged the local government to launch an official investigation, and now five policemen and a politician have been brought up on murder charges. What can Facebook or other companies do to help these journalists report on corruption in a safe manner?
It's not up to Facebook to do anything, other than comply with the applicable laws of the country they're located in. If the company inserted itself into a local and controversial political problem, then it could be putting its own employees at risk.
Indias legal excecutive is basically "Judge Dredd" in real-life. Courts are so behind, murder investigations and convictions can take up to 25 years before even starting. The police solve this on their own to maintain order by staging "encounters" for people who've killed more than once. They basically find you, arrest you for something petty they can pin on you and then shoot you for resisting/trying to flee.
With such factually absolute powers for the police, they're bound to turn corrupt.
I'd say it's no surprise that in such a system an exposure of police corruption get's you killed mafia style.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Don't teach your journalists how to avoid being murdered. Teach your boys not to murder to gain and remain in power.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If it did, it wouldn't be crime, now would it? A state openly run by the Mafia would simply be your run-of-the-mill military dictatorship or warlord-ridden anarchy, depending on whether a single faction was supreme or not.
No, what we're seeing here is the difference between official and real culture. That is what corruption is, at its core: a culture tries to pretend it's something else - something better - than it actually is, a kind of "werewolf state" which mauls people by night and damns wolfs by day. Everyone goes along with the lie because when someone points out the hypocrisy, the mask of decency slips and the beast comes out.
But when the beast is out, it can be seen by all. That is its weakness. People can no longer pretend everything is fine; they must either openly submit to the wolf - and accept they're going to be devoured - or fight to rid themselves of it. And this beast has no claws of its own, only those lent to it by its slaves. Knowing that, it too must choose whether to strike back and risk breaking its spell entirely, or give up some of its malevolence and become less like a wolf and more like a human.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I clearly need to be more detailed in my comments. My bad. See two comments aboe you for connection between encryption and anonymity.
Encryption -not of content (the story) but of internet connections- is what permits people to post and read online anonymously.
If people can find out what your IP address is or otherwise get at what computer you were using to author the story then they have an excellent chance at identifying you. To defeat this and remain anonymous, encryption is used by software like TOR to hopelessly obscure the actual source of the computer.
If you surf using some form of encryption to hide your actual IP address it makes it hard for low-level bad guys, even ones with govt. connections, to know who you are.
Of course very powerful goverments like the US can track you, absolutely using a VPN (we know this from Snowden) and probably even TOR can't protect you anymore - that is just my best guess given how TOR works and the what resources that government has at its disposal.
But it takes a nation-state level effort to do that. This guy was not killed by someone with access to that kind of power.
HTH
It's not like all of India is run this way
India is actually becoming much less corrupt, and for a reason that should make us nerds happy: technology. India runs vast welfare schemes, including subsidized rice and fuel, and guaranteed work programs. In the past, these were done on a cash basis, and hopelessly corrupted, with each layer of authorities skimming off their percentage, until only a fraction reached the poor. But the cash has been replaced with a combination ID and debit card that cuts out all the intermediaries. This has weakened corrupt networks, and raised people's expectations, so they are demanding cleaner government in other areas. The Internet, and especially social media, has made exposing corruption much easier. Sites like I Paid a Bribe are very popular in India.
It is sad that this journalist was killed, but it is actually a sign of progress, because at least the crooks saw him as a viable threat. A decade ago he would have just been ignored.