ON MONDAY evening, the website of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) could not be accessed. Up to this writing, nujp.org remained "access denied."
In a statement issued through social media, NUJP revealed that the inaccessibility was due to a "denial of service (DoS)" anomaly.
"We do not know by whom but this we can say – whoever are responsible for this attack are enemies of press freedom and of free expression. They are vermin, narrow-minded, misbegotten souls who mistakenly believe that they can silence critical speech and thought in their desire to force people into accepting only one worldview – theirs." The statement said.
The DoS, or can be referred also as "Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), is a technical term in information technology that defined as an operation made by third-party individuals or groups to manipulate websites making it inaccessible.
"In simpler terms, it floods (massive traffic caused by 'bots') to a specified website," IT consultant and blogger Richard Maboloc, explained.
Despite the existence of anti-cybercrime law in the country, cyber-attacks persist as a new weapon to curtail, if not harass, press freedom. It may not as damaging than the killing of journalists, but it can still send a disturbing message that critical views and dissent to a system is not tolerated; and to say the least - an affront to democracy.
The cyber-attack on NUJP website came after its recent statement reminding President Rodrigo Duterte that news reportage is not a joke and whatever he pronounces in the public, whether it may be a joke or not, is considered a public policy.
And how it becomes timely when the charisma of Duterte became so overwhelming to the point that any negative report coming out from the press is deemed a plot to destabilize his presidency and his administration, insinuating that all media organizations are paid hacks (although this is a reality to some, but not all).
But this is not the first time. Under the Duterte administration similar website attacks against the press were made in the online portal of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) on July 2016 at the height of running stories on the war on drugs. The organization's website was also hacked in 2005 when it run series of stories on former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's "Hello Garci" scandal.
During President Benigno Aquino III's term in 2013, the website of Manila Standard Today was attacked by exploiting vulnerabilities of the news website’s content management system (WordPress), to redirect requests for news reports and opinion articles to a porn site, which resulted in Google and Facebook’s marking the web-pages as malicious spam and banning the web-pages from being shared. This was after the paper published opinion-columns that are critical to Aquino.
The public should understand that despite it may antagonize the current administration's course of actions, press freedom is crucial to democracy and our civil liberties. Shutting any forms of criticism because it is not "good" to the eyes and "ears" is tantamount to ignoring the social realities.
By and by, the more we shut and ignore these, it will haunt us back, we only have created a monster that will eventually destroy us. And that monster is called ignorance.
(Nefluczon@gmail.com)