A Web-Savvy Latvian Uncovers and Spotlights Public Corruption
The Challenge
“There is very little trust in Latvia's institutions right now, so anyone who can expose the system is going to be a hero,” said Latvian political commentator Juris Kaza last spring. This was the case with one citizen who, calling himself “Neo,” uncovered a loophole in a government website that exposed the inflated salaries of bosses at state-run companies.
The climate was ripe for a public outcry. Latvia was hit hard by 2008’s global financial crisis. With unemployment rates increasing from 9 percent to 23 percent in one year, they were the highest in the European Union. As economist Paul Krugman wrote in December of that year, “the most acute problems are on Europe’s periphery, where many smaller economies are experiencing crises strongly reminiscent of past crises in Latin America and Asia: Latvia is the new Argentina; Ukraine is the new Indonesia.”
Enter Neo and the “Fourth Awakening Peoples’ army,” who uncovered proof that politicians were harboring treasure troves padded by excessive bonuses instead of taking the salary cuts that they had promised the public they would. Neo made this data public by pulling it from the State Revenue Service website, re-presenting it so that it would be easy to read and understand what the information meant, and sending out links to his own presentations of the data via Twitter.
Neo quickly earned what the BBC called “cult status,” aggravating authorities and energizing citizens to call for increased government accountability in the Baltic state. But almost a year later, the unemployment rate remains as high as ever in Latvia, and the newest Corruption Perceptions Index drops Latvia’s ranking for the second year in a row.
Has anyone been held accountable for the information the Neo exposed? Can we expect Neo, even as the government threatens him with jail time, to find the time to develop a more sustainable mechanism for allowing citizens to monitor information that should be in the public domain?
PLAYERS
While putting the finishing touches on his tax returns using the State Revenue Service’s online system, Neo, whose real name is Ilm?rs Poik?ns, discovered that anyone on the internet could access any document that had gone through the system—without authorization of any kind. Ilm?rs, a self-professed "IT guy," is a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Latvia. He also has his own IT business, which specializes in startups. From the beginning, he has identified himself as being part of a group called the "Peoples' Army of the Fourth Awakening," although some speculated that this group was just another way to deflect attention from himself. He still can't comment publicly on the exact nature of the group and its relationship to him.
Before adopting the Neo moniker he wasn't a political activist, as he says:
"I was mainly just passively watching what is going on in politics before. I have written some article which explains my views about questions in referendum, which was about possibility and condition for people to revoke parliament in referendum initiated by people themselves."
In spotting information that was in the public domain but that no one had noticed and deciding to do something with that data, he moved away from being a passive watcher of Latvian politics and ended up transforming himself into an activist.
TOOLS AND TACTICS
Neo was depicted as the Robin Hood of hackers in much of the media coverage of what he did, but this wasn’t really hacking at all. The information that he supposedly “uncovered” was already out there, it’s just that not enough people were training their eyes on it. It was in turning the data into a digestible format that Neo was able to make a splash. As he says:
“[We] downloaded most of the data that was in the system, processed it, and produced reports for different companies where you could see salaries of employees [for each company] month by month. Then those files were uploaded to file-hosting services, and links to those files were published on Twitter. [After this] portals and newspapers began to publish the data. Mostly they’d republish it, showing who earned which salaries.”
Here's the Associated Press's report on how the data was initially brought to the fore:
On Wednesday "Neo" published salaries of members of Latvia's police force and, in comments on a Twitter account, said "I call on the police union to analyze the data and determine whether the salary reform is fair and to continue the fight against crime."
Earlier this week "Neo" released data showing that the CEO of Riga's heating company, Aris Zigurs, paid himself a 16,000 lat ($32,000) bonus last year—a hefty sum for a city-owned utility, especially at a time when many municipal workers have had their salaries slashed. Zigurs confirmed to Latvian media the data was accurate.
STUMBLING BLOCKS
While it was helpful, and perhaps necessary, for the media to have discovered the links on Twitter and republished them in mediums with broader audiences, the problem was that these media reports “weren’t pressing government institutions or even asking tough questions—no one was attempting to hold these politicians accountable.” As a result, there was far less public outrage that one might have expected.
“If there had been real outrage” ignited by the press, says Neo, “there would have been bigger consequences....People are so passive in Latvia....My guess is that in Greece or France there would be big demonstrations requiring some measurable change but not in Latvia...protest is not part of the culture in Latvia.”
OUTCOME
The hole in the State Revenue Service’s online system was soon closed, and the widespread protest that Neo had expected never came about.
Nevertheless, there were some positive outcomes: A law was passed in May that requires state institutions to publish its data in much the same way as Neo originally did—according to company and with each salary displayed down to the month. As Neo says, "There is more transparency now, so at least there's more information out there than before." Yet the authorities who originally detained him for alleged illegal access to the tax records only released him on probation pending another trial - will he be detained again? The criminal investigation, he says, is still in progress, "but police haven't interrogated me for a second time. I don't know what they are doing—maybe ignoring me for as long as possible."
In the meantime, he hopes to work with government accountability NGOs in Latvia to create a platform for publicly available documents are widely available to any Latvian citizen, something that draws equally from the UK's What Do They Know and the US based Document Cloud, saying "different organizations have pieces of information, but they are in separate places, and it would be useful for [everyone] to put those pieces in one place so anyone could see the bigger picture." But, he adds, it couldn't be hosted it in Latvia because police could shut the server down without cause.
It's likely that this tension between activists' efforts and the bounds placed on these efforts by police and government are what will mark the quest for greater transparency and accountability in the upcoming years. What Neo's efforts have shown, though, is that sometimes important steps towards this transparency dont have to incorporate complicated tactics and hacking, but can be as simple as putting a spotlight on information already available.
For more information on this case study check out the following case:
“THE NEO CASE – CRIME COMMITTED OR WELL ORGANIZED POLITICALLY MOTIVATED PUNISHMENT?”
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