Although the Internet has been around for quite some time now, governments and companies seem to have difficulty understanding how it actually works.
This has been evident many times, starting with the entertainment industry, which has asked Google to police the Internet and remove links from searching results, believing that in this way they can eliminate them completely.
The same thing happened when governments asked journalists to return digital copies of files. The most obvious example occurred a few months ago when the British intelligence services have called for Guardian journalists to destroy their hard drivesς, containing the Snowden records.
This, of course, happened despite the newspaper's attempts to point out to the British government that the move would make sense given that the files are stored elsewhere. This is the advantage of digital documents – the ability to have countless copies, stored on equally countless devices, in the cloud, in emails post officeand elsewhere.
Then comes the Australian government's turn to do something crazy. OR Asher Wolf, an Australian journalist working at the local Guardian branch was asked to return confidential information that had already been published.
Το αίτημα που έλαβε η Wolf απαιτούσε να επιστρέψει πίσω τα αρχεία που χρησιμοποίησε για να γράψει ένα άρθρο με τίτλο “Immigration Department data lapse reveals asylum seekers' personal details,” το οποίο δημοσιεύτηκε την περασμένη εβδteam .
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The article mentioned in the request sent by the government was based on a document that was available on the website of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, which contained personal information of current and former prisoners.
"The information, which was never intended for publication, was available to them. "Once they realized the unintentional breach, the service took immediate steps to remove the material from its website," said Wolf.
The government reminded that journalists should not pass on information through "dishonest and unfair" means, which, of course, is quite hilarious considering that every material published on the Internet is public and therefore available for all to read and download.
The reporter was then asked to return all copies of the information immediately.
Of course, this could only happen from people who do not understand anything about how computers and the Internet work.
For its part, Wolf responded to the government, insisting on its position and pointing out the obvious - that the file used by the Guardian was already available to the public. Even if the newspaper published it, it tried to protect the people whose names were mentioned in the archive.
Wolf concluded her letter stating that she did not know who else had taken the document or had access to the information and that she obviously had no intention of giving the service any of her storage devices.
This record has since been downloaded from the state website.
Ultimately it is very important that governments start to learn that when one of the services them, publishes a document by mistake, the document is available to the public, and that the people responsible for the mistake should be held accountable, not the reporter or anyone else who had access to the file.
Article by Gabriela Vatu from softpedia
