It was wrong to try to steal his secret sauce

New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager writes powerful books on subjects like intelligence networks, politics, and environmental issues. Sometimes people – powerful people at powerful institutions – get SO ANGRY about his books they commit illegal acts against him. Then he sues them. How dare he?!

We’re now reading Hager’s 1999 Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign, co-authored with Bob Burton. It documents a secret campaign, carried on by international public relations group Shandwick/Weber Shandwick Worldwide, against environmental groups like Native Forest Action. (The campaign included greenwashing, insertion of pro-logging material into school curricula, getting magazine articles canceled, tearing down posters, SLAPP lawsuits…). Anger at the book’s revelations seems to have contributed to the 2000 Forests Act, banning the logging of publicly-owned native forests.

In 2014 Hager published Dirty Politics: how attack politics is poisoning New Zealand’s political environment. According to the New Zealand Herald, it “alleged the office of former Prime Minister Sir John Key ran a dirty tricks campaign through [a] right-wing blogger.” Part of the material he used came from a leak of hacked documents. The police told a judge they needed warrants because this Nicky Hager guy was suspected of fraud, without mentioning that Hager was a journalist. They got the warrants and searched Hager’s house for 10 hours, taking computers and documents. They searched his bank records. They searched airline records of his travels. They found nothing.

Hager sued, received “substantial” damages, and got an apology from the police, in which they admitted they lied when they said he was a fraud suspect, that they didn’t tell the judge he was a journalist, and that the search warrant was “overly broad.”

Now, back in 2011, Hager published Other People’s Wars, which looked into New Zealand’s participation in the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq. We venture to say he is critical of some government actions and the big puffer coat of secrecy and deception with which they were hidden from the public. Hager used leaked military information for the book. Who leaked it to him? He didn’t say.

Well! New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (SIS) took a hostile view of this. They suspected that a certain member of the NZ Defence Force had given Hager information for the book. Illegally. Hoping to prove this, they seized two months of Hager’s phone records. Illegally. Poked into his airline flight records too.

Those phone records showed no link between Hager and the person the SIS suspected. Nothing from the airlines. (Where the heck do they think he is flying, anyway? What would that even prove?)

Hager sued the SIS over this in 2012. It took TEN YEARS, but ultimately he got a settlement, the payment of his legal fees, and an apology from the SIS. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Madeleine Laracy, ruled that the SIS used “intrusive investigatory powers” without justification. “I have been unable to find that the [SIS] showed the kind of caution I consider proper, for an intelligence agency in a free and democratic society, about launching any investigation into a journalist’s sources.”

Rebecca Kitteridge, the SIS Director-General, was the one who apologized to Hager. In a statement, Kitteridge said the SIS had apologized to Hager for its failings, and any impact and distress it caused, adding, “I reiterate that apology to Mr Hager publicly.”

Argh. First of all, saying that you apologized is not the same as apologizing. Maybe the earlier apology was a good one, but it doesn’t look likely. Hager said, and we agree, “This issue needs to be fixed for the future. I want the SIS to introduce clear policies that will prevent them from targeting media organizations and journalists in this way again.”

Exactly! In general, people getting apologies for having been harmed want to hear that steps are being taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is huge in medical apologies – it’s bad enough they amputated the wrong finger, but how do they plan to make sure they don’t keep on lopping off people’s fingers randomly? As we describe in our book, this is a vital part of medical apologies that ward off lawsuits.

It’s good the SIS apologized, but to be sure it’s not a “we’re sorry WE GOT CAUGHT” apology, instead of a “we’re sorry WE DID A BAD THING” apology, we need to hear that they’ve made appropriate changes.

We worry that next time the police or the SIS fly off the handle about one of Nicky Hager’s infuriatingly revealing books, they’ll just try to be sneakier. What’s to stop them? There’s nothing in the apology about that…