AFP powers chilling for journalism

The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union and industry advocate for journalists, reiterates its concerns that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) is using its powers to investigate the contact journalists have with their confidential sources.

In a news release issued on Saturday February 13, the AFP confirmed it had received 13 referrals in 18 months relating to disclosure of Commonwealth information contained in legitimate news stories. The AFP sought to make a virtue that in the majority of the referrals it had not needed to access the journalists’ telecommunications data.

However, the AFP statement also makes it clear it sees that pursuing journalists’ confidential sources by seeking to access the telecommunications data of journalists to identify those sources is a "legitimate avenue for enquiry”, if the AFP sees that as necessary.

The AFP’s comments come after Guardian Australia journalist Paul Farrell revealed that one of his stories on asylum seekers sparked a 200-page AFP file. The file was “made up of operational centre meeting minutes, files notes, interview records and a plan for an investigation the AFP undertook” into one of Farrell’s stories. Included in the file was a record showing that during the investigation, the AFP had drawn up a list of possible suspects along with possible offences it believes they may have committed and that an AFP officer had logged more than 800 electronic updates on the investigation file.

MEAA CEO Paul Murphy said: “The AFP says these investigations are not about targeting journalists. What it fails to consider is that if you are chasing down confidential sources you are in fact targeting journalism.

“It seems bizarrely inconsistent that our Commonwealth statutes recognise the ethical obligation of journalists to protect sources in the Evidence Protection (Journalist Privilege) Act, while at the same time Commonwealth agencies are routinely spending enormous resources to circumvent that protection.

"Government agencies will refer a journalist’s story for investigation regardless of the public interest, and the AFP will use its powers to pursue the source,” Murphy said.

“We have seen how the AFP responded to a single story by a single journalist. A journalist’s legitimate reporting in the public interest should never be allowed to trigger a 200-page police investigation.

“We reiterate our call for full and proper protection of public interest journalism,” Murphy said.