THE Sun’s revelation that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock enjoyed a secret assignation with Gina Coladangelo behind an office door wasn’t just a great scoop.
It was an example of journalism in the public interest, par excellence.
That now-notorious image of the couple in a clinch raised serious issues about his failure to follow the same Covid rules he required everyone else to comply with.
There were howls of outrage from families up and down the land who had not hugged loved ones due to the laws Hancock helped make.
And it raised serious questions about the appointment to an important position in the Department of Health of a woman with whom he was having an intimate relationship.
So it is astounding that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has decided to try to root out the source for this crucial story.
Two homes were raided yesterday by data officials, who seized computers and electronic devices.
High-level hypocrisy
The very legislation the ICO used to carry out this investigation — Section 170 of the Data Protection Act — includes “public interest” as a defence against prosecution.
As The Sun’s Editor has said, the story about Hancock’s affair is an exposé of high-level political hypocrisy.
And lest we forget it in this era of fake news, it was TRUE. No one involved in the story has disputed its accuracy or the authenticity of the CCTV footage published by The Sun to corroborate the story.
The seriousness of Hancock’s misconduct and the level of public outrage was such that he had no option but to resign.
As with many such newspaper articles, it was based on information given to journalists by a whistleblower or whistleblowers with access to information from inside the Government. In the trade these are known as confidential journalistic sources and their identities are strongly protected in law.
Authorities are not supposed to use investigatory powers to unmask them or to probe the process by which the information came to pass in confidence from them to the journalists, other than in the most exceptional of cases.
This means, at the very least, there must be an overriding need to do so to protect some other important public interest — perhaps to catch terrorists or tackle organised crime.
And a judge should provide careful oversight of the use of such powers. This is because those involved in the leaking of the information — both sources and journalists — have fundamental rights. If those rights are not respected by state authorities in our democracy, we all suffer.
The flow of information from sources to public-interest journalists is liable to be chilled every time such powers are used — and particularly when they are used without any proper justification.
There are numerous recent examples of major news organisations publishing stories based on leaked documents, such as the so-called Paradise Papers and Panama Papers, which revealed private financial details of powerful people.
The ICO’s action means we are less likely to receive through the media the sort of information we are entitled to in order to ensure those in power are answerable to the people and held to account.
The Government has recognised this by declining to launch its own inquiry into the leak. Nor is there a police inquiry. These are the two types of inquiry that are normally in issue in such cases.
Free speech
Worryingly, the commissioner has now stumbled into this carefully worked-out and vitally important landscape of legal protections for journalistic free speech.
I do not underestimate the ICO’s role as a regulator. It is to protect the personal data of citizens.
In most cases where a third party may have obtained the personal data of individuals unlawfully, it should be fully investigated by the ICO using its legal powers of investigation — including, if necessary, the power to obtain and execute search warrants.
This is why the commissioner has these powers. But they should not be exercised in a case like this.
There is no suggestion that Hancock or Coladangelo — whose personal data was disclosed in the footage — have made a complaint to the ICO.
Nor, apparently, has the Department of Health or any other part of government.
If a contractor, such as the firm that provided the CCTV service to the department, has lost such data, it must notify the ICO. But this does not mean the commissioner must use those powers in every case of this type.
Most read in Opinion
CLEMMIE MOODIE 
If our football is to be equal to men’s, we have to take a joke
Boris would be wise to heed the growing backlash against his planned tax rise
Joe Biden’s invite to Vladimir Putin is go-ahead to China too
I love BBC but my daughter and other youngsters don’t…that is its problem
Like any state investigation into a possible criminal offence — and especially a minor one like this — there has to be a public interest in using these sorts of coercive state powers.
And the use has to be compatible with the fundamental rights of the whistleblowers and the journalists. In a case of high-value public-interest journalism like this, neither of these conditions is even remotely made out.
This is heavy-handed and misconceived state action of the sort that, in the long run, harms all of us and our democracy.
Source: Read Full Article
