As more and more EU member states introduce electronic payment systems for public transport, Dutch police investigates a journalist on suspicions of fraud after showing weakness in the security of the Dutch system.

Read article by guest blogger Staffan Dahllöf:

A Dutch journalist, Brenno de Winter, showed on TV how easy it is to cheat a new electronic payment system for public transport. The prosecutor took up the case – in order to decide whether the journalist should be prosecuted for fraud.

Mary Hallebeek, press officer at the prosecutor’s office in Utrecht describes the case as delicate:

”The journalist did this to show that the system doesn’t function well, and he had been telling this in different publications before. We are aware of that he had a journalistic purpose, and the purpose of an act should be considered according to Dutch law,” she told Wobbing.eu.

Ms Hallebeek says that the investigation was triggered by a notification to the prosecutors office by Trans Link Systems, the company designing the payment system, but adds that the prosecutor also was aware of the alleged fraud through the media.

Brenno de Winter says he didn’t see another way of proving claims of the weaknesses of the system, mainly as the company behind the system had refused to answer direct questions.

Several other journalists joined him in his research, and published their results. However police has questioned none of them and the public prosecutor’s office has indicated that no other reporters are in the scope of a possible prosecution.

“I’m a freelance journalist whereas the other journalists have regular employments. So to be singled out hits me harder than it would hit the national news,” Brenno de Winter says.

The core of the case is a digital payment system for public transportation, a project mainly funded with public money, and with a price tag with a large number on it.

Brenno de Winter argues that the used technology is highly insecure and that several scientific studies have warned for the risks for using this card as a payment system.

But a decision to carry on was made on the promise that fraud easily would be detected, and fraudulent cards would be blocked after a maximum of 24 hours.

Early this year Brenno de Winter showed that people with a basic computer knowledge is capable of defrauding the system, using standard tools available on the Internet.

He also showed that this could be done without the system detecting the attempts, and that cards generally aren’t blocked.

And he proved that using a card that has been blocked is still possible without being discovered by the system.

“The central systems turned out to fail in all thinkable ways,” Brenno de Winter claims.

The seemingly vulnerable payment system had caught big attention in the Dutch media  and the revelations have been debated in the Parliament.

At the prosecutors office Mary Hallenbeek says that a decision to prosecute or not, and if so, on what grounds, most likely will be taken within a week or two.

The article has previously been published on Wobbing.eu

Update September 9th: Investigation closed and case dropped. Read more on Wobbing.eu

Politicians have said it. The European Ombudsman has said it. Now even the European Court is getting close to saying it: Freedom of information is a fundamental right in a democracy.
My point today is, that rights wither away, if we do not use them. So we need tools to help us do so. I’ll be back to that later.

The Court did not go quite as far as saying, that access to information held by public authorities is a fundamental right. However it did say that he European people shall have the widest possible right of access to information. The latter was said in a court case decided yesterday, just read from point 55 of the court decision and onwards. The Spanish NGO Access Info had asked which EU countries are in favour and which are against the new draft EU regulation on access to documents. It thus challenged the Council tradition of not disclosing member states arguments in negotiations. A recent report shows that only five countries released documents on the positions. But how, then, can there be any political debate?

The Access Info court case is one of numerous where NGOs, politicians, companies and individuals fight for the right of freedom of information.

The EU as well as most of its member states have laws regulating this particular to the public. Those countries, who still do not have a law, do at least have the EUs access to environmental documents directive.

However once a law is in force, it has to be used. Particularly, maybe, in Europe. We have the very open traditions giving large access to information to the public in the Nordic countries. Not only is it a public law to provide information to the citizens, it is an explicit aim by the ministerial administrations. Also the United Kingdom, Estonia, Slovenia, the Netherlands and others have strong and efficient laws.

Now when it comes to efficiency, it’s not easy to divide in good and bad. We have to look at habit. If citizens, NGOs, journalists, lawyers, companies do use their right to freedom of information, a practice will evolve to obey by the law. Court cases (as the one of yesterday) or decisions by ombudsmen and information commissioners strengthen the respect for the public’s interest to know. And numerous requests give officials the habit of sharing public information with the public – which, too, is a question of habit and respect.

Citizens and more importantly even journalists have the task to use the law intelligently and persistently. We have to consider our requests carefully and target them clearly – in respect for the workload that a decent and thorough answer (which we have a right to and expect) may bring to often understaffed departments in the administration. We have to be polite, clear and efficient in our contact with officials. Using our right is not an act of aggression – as it is considered in many countries without a tradition for openness. Filing a request for information is nothing but using an administrative option inhabitant in any vital democracy which citizens can expect to be administrated as any other administrative task within a certain time frame and in a constructive spirit.

In order to help journalists and others to use our right to access to information, we have updated and improved an obvious tool for using our right. Do have a look at the new wobbing-site. Wob is Dutch journalists’ slang for freedom of information laws, and it can be changed easily into a verb: Have you been wobbing today?

If not, go to www.wobbing.eu and have a look. If you want to know how to use the website as a too, have a look at the various options, it provides.

In Moldova, an immediate neighbour of the EU, last year three young people died in protests against election fraud.

The election had to be repeated, but the violence remains a national memory. Now a journalistic project asks the Moldovan public to help analyse, what really happened. 16 hours of protests captured in 300 clips recorded by 13 different surveillance cameras, documenting the entire so-called “Twitter Revolution” in Moldova.

The project got technical support developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and works with a journalist research grant from Danish-Eastern-European Scoop.

The Watchdog Blog has been in touch with Stefan Candea from the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism. The journalist team behind the story asks those, who may have knowledge about the events, to help analyse the files. This is a task too big for individual journalists to analyse. Below I would like to quote from the website, where the surveillance clips are available. If you want to read more, you can go to the refering website of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Text from the website:
In April 2009, about 15,000 people went to the streets of Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. The protests started with a flashmob on April the 6th, and grew bigger the next day on April the 7th. International media called it the “Twitter Revolution” and communist rulers called it a “Romanian provocation”. The demonstrators themselves claimed that elections were rigged and demanded the resignation of the communist government or the recount of votes. Events soon escalated out of control.

President Vladimir Voronin and the communist regime reacted violently to the protests, suspending the constitution starting with that night. The results: at least three dead youth, almost one thousand young people illegally arrested and tortured, over one thousand days of arrests issued, a president and prime-minister threatening to shoot the protesters and ordering the sequestration of students in schools.

The government tried to control any information related to the riots, so while one journalist was placed under house arrest, eight other journalists were picked up from the street and kept captive for hours or days, tens of reporters were beaten, harassed, threatened, almost 30 foreign journalists expelled or denied access into the Republic of Moldova. Internet connections were blocked, phone conversations jammed.

More than a year and a half after, nobody knows the names of people responsible for the abuses committed during those days. Nobody knows how many of the crowd were protesters or how many were actually working for the Moldovan Government. The repetition of the elections brought the communist regime to an end. Nevertheless, only one police officer and three judges were brought to justice. Less then 50 victims sued the government. Many of the other hundreds of victims felt intimidated by police not to press charges, or don’t have evidence.

You can change that!

Here are the uncut 16 hours of a revolution. This is the CCTV footage from 7th of April and the night that followed, recorded by government surveillance cameras located on the buildings of the Government, the Parliament and the Presidency in downtown Chisinau. These are the relevant hours captured in 300 clips recorded by 13 surveillance cameras starting on April the 7 at 10 am and ending at 2 am next morning. Moldovan authorities never released these videos.

We ask Moldovans to identify people and situations that were not reported in the media and to post a detailed comment under the video you are screening. Agents provocateurs? Violent protesters? Please log in to leave your observations, especially ones that might allow victims to hold perpetuators accountable. International lobby groups, organizations, artists or whoever is interested in the raw material, download all the videos in complete, uncompressed form.