The Help Me Investigate blog

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

"During a critical phase in their reporting Dahlin and Geist asked for access from the Swedish authorities in order to find out if, and when, the Nordic ministers had informed each other on how to interpret the convention.
"”We took a chance, and got a positive cultural chock. The Swedish ministry excused for not being able to answer immediately and then returned the day after. They never asked us who we were or our purpose,” Anton Gleist, says and adds:
"”Later we found out that the Swedes were given the factual information from the Danish ministry and then passed it on to us. But the Danes only came up with an answer weeks later. It was groteque.”
"A bit later also the Norwegians and the Finns provided the Danish reporters with information they were not given at home."
"The reporters could thus demonstrate that the Danish minister had known how differently the other Nordic countries interpreted the very same convention, more than a year before she confessed to a committee at the Danish parliament."

The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, announced last week that private emails are covered by FoI laws. This clarification in FoI law allows researchers, academics, campaigners and journalists to request the private emails of government officials.

The information commissioner has decided to allow email requests into FoI law since the revelations that members of the Department of Education, headed by Michael Gove, were encouraged to share important information via email in an attempt to avoid FoI requests.

Commenting on the news, Mr Graham stated: “It should not come as a surprise to public authorities to have the clarification that information held in private email accounts can be subject to Freedom of Information law if it relates to official business. This has always been the case – the Act covers all recorded information in any form”.

Surprisingly, some FoI campaigners have interpreted ‘all information’ to include text messages and even post-it-notes.

Guidance regarding FoI requests and private emails can be found on the Information Commissioner’s website -- just follow the links.

Ian Silvera

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

It's a good example of a question that can form the basis of an investigation. And if you're looking for an investigation to do, here's a quick recipe:

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

Although the website for the Danish investigative journalism conference is, understandably, in Danish, many of the videos from its recent conference are in English. 

Highlights include the MI5 spy turned whistleblower Annie Machon and Finnish journalist Paula Sallinen, who created a fake online identity to investigate paedophiles, but there are plenty more to explore. 

If you use the Chrome browser you can also turn on automatic translation for the text surrounding the videos.

Posted by Paul Bradshaw

"The new evidence ... confirmed almost everything I had reported in July of this year. But one important element shifted: the police could no longer be sure exactly who had caused the particular deletions that led to that "false hope" moment.

"[T]wo pieces of new evidence have made the picture more complex. First, Surrey police have been able to establish the exact timing of the false-hope moment, at 7pm on the evening of Sunday 24 March 2002, three days after Milly was abducted. This was a surprise for the Dowlers who had always recalled that it happened two or three weeks after her disappearance. Original police records show that, understandably in the awful stress of events, their timeframe was distorted.

"Second, Scotland Yard concluded that Mulcaire was not tasked to intercept the girl's messages until after that date. This was a surprise to Mulcaire who had felt very oppressed by the Dowler revelations and who, according to a close friend, was in tears after he heard the news.

"So who did delete the messages which gave false hope to the Dowlers? At first, one other fragment of new evidence appeared to provide the answer: records showed that Milly's phone would automatically delete any message 72 hours after it had been listened to. The false-hope moment happened some 75 hours after she was abducted on Thursday afternoon, March 21. But this theory then collapsed, because the records also showed that she had not listened to her voicemail since the preceding day, so the 72-hour period had ended on the Saturday afternoon."

The lesson is simple: when new evidence emerges, compare it against your own evidence and be prepared to acknowledge that facts may have changed. A witnesses' perception of time can be affected by their emotional state at the time; potential answers can prove illusory; and the villain of the piece may have come onto the scene after the window of opportunity. Stories are not always as clear as they seem.