Romanian journalists expose their own surveillance

Hey there,

When Victor Ilie told me that of course journalists should be investigated by the government, I was shocked.

After all, he and his partner Luiza Vasiliu had written an incredible story for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) about being followed down the streets of Bucharest by government officials as they went to pick up their child from nursery. Victor’s phone had been tapped; some of his sources were compromised. It was a journalist’s nightmare.

Here in the UK, surveilling journalists has been a hot-button issue for years. In fact, my newsroom took the UK government to court – the European Court of Human Rights, to be specific – for the mass surveillance conducted by GCHQ.

But in Romania, Victor told me, a short period of surveillance is a fairly standard part of a criminal investigation. And he said: “I fully agree with the act of opening the criminal case against me – because you can't simply presume that journalists aren’t corrupt.”

The criminal case file, which Victor got access to last year, said he’d offered a €10,000 bribe to a local official in a bid to smuggle stolen grain from Ukraine. And on the face of it: yeah, he had.

Something I’ve learnt in the year I’ve been writing this newsletter (and yes, I will be celebrating The Spark’s birthday very soon) is that there isn’t just one way to do journalism. Even when you whittle down the options – not just journalism, but investigative journalism; not just investigative, but for a purpose, to achieve something good – there’s still thousands of people doing it thousands of ways.

Take undercover journalism. It’s maybe the most intriguing, exciting and, dare I say, sexy kind of journalism, bar the adventures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. It’s also incredibly risky. Going undercover usually means lying in some form or another – maybe just on a job application, maybe in the flesh.

This work is Victor’s speciality. A few years ago he went undercover in the Romanian Orthodox church to expose its use of public funds. He’s also worked with Dispatches, the Channel 4 programme, to reveal organised crime in Northampton.

The grain-smuggling story was no different. Working with the RISE project, a leading Romanian investigative newsroom, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Victor had heard that an official in Iasi, a city near Romania’s border with Ukraine, was taking bribes to let shell companies smuggle grain. Victor rang him, pretending to be a businessman, and got a face-to-face meeting. Then, he was asked to leave his phone in the main office while they talked in a side room.

As Victor put it in the BIRN piece:

Then, a few days later, the official reported him for attempted bribery, and the investigation was opened.

The resulting surveillance was extensive: two months of wiretapping and two days of in-person trailing by six agents. You’d think, then, that someone would have noticed that Victor’s back catalogue included several undercover stings. But nowhere in the criminal file does it note that he and his partner are journalists.

It’s almost funny. One page shows a picture of Victor on his phone, “outside the building where he conducts his activities”. It’s an office block that’s home to several independent newsrooms.

He told me: “The interior affairs ministry has a national database on all Romanian citizens. I have declared there when I made my ID, that I'm a journalist. They’d know by just checking my personal ID number. They would see that from the very first check that I’m a journalist.”

Victor suspects the officers knew right away that he was a journalist. They just wanted to hunt down his sources.

“I’m really intrigued that they never wrote that down, like nowhere. The judge [who would have signed off on the surveillance] presumably didn't know I'm a journalist. She was like, ‘Well, they follow a dude, they know nothing about him’. But definitely the prosecutors knew.”

When Victor first saw the operatives tailing him, he assumed it would be related to an investigation he was working on into the accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan.

It wouldn’t be until the case against him was close to being closed that he found out – Romanian law states victims of surveillance have to be told about it once the official investigation ends.

When Victor got access to the criminal file, he took the story to BIRN. They pushed him to look deeper. “They were like, ‘You can't really publish something about just your story. You should check if there's a phenomenon out there.’”

And sure enough, the Iasi authorities had done this before. In fact, it had become ingrained. And local journalists were bearing the brunt of it. When they’d revealed potential corruption in the mayor’s office, the authorities had started investigating them for harassment. The officials in question were never wiretapped, but the reporters were.

Every case against them was eventually closed for lack of evidence. In the meantime, though, they’d been under surveillance for months. Many of them were despondent.

But Victor’s article may be turning the tide. I’ll let him tell that part of the story.

“I’ve been pretty privileged to usually work in independent media outlets where the public is so nice. The newsrooms I’ve been part of were all crowdfunded and every time I published something, the public was there to endorse us, to reshare, to keep the stories alive.

I was so happy to have this opportunity to write about myself, to write a very cinematic piece. ‘I was there. I spotted the first one. I spotted the second one, and so on.’ But then we realised there are many other reporters. We’ve identified two newsrooms that were in the same situation.

It was amazing to see the local journalists being recognised in this huge scandal. The bigger the scandal is, the bigger the protection is for local journalists in the future. That’s important because they've been through some very awful stuff there.

For instance, one of them who has two daughters, who are incredibly smart and good at school – the people he used to write about complained about him to child protection services and had the kids taken from the house. I know this guy, his soul is like a flower, he’s not a violent dude, he’s shy. And obviously he was scared as hell.

Now the people he wrote about are under investigation from the central government agencies, because the local ones were ignoring them for years.

When you work in the central media landscape here in Romania, you switch topics very often. But when you just live in a town, you have to keep writing about the mayor continuously. And so the authorities tend to be more aggressive with local journalists because they are a present threat.

I had been there in Iasi for this undercover, I just left the city. But they will live there and keep writing and so they are more exposed to the abuse. There were often local scandals but it never broke through.

Publishing their stories was really important because the Ministry of Justice suddenly opened their eyes like, ‘Okay, we have a problem there’. They didn’t fully admit it, but at least they talked about it. There are records out there about the Ministry of Justice and the National Anti-Corruption Directorate accepting there might be problems. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe wants to meet us and talk about how it happened and why.

I was really amazed by the solidarity. All the mainstream media outlets reported on our case, even the TV stations where I had written about their bosses over the years. It was amazing, because usually there is competition between newsrooms where one won’t follow another’s story. But that didn’t happen this time. I got really emotional about this.

Hopefully next time a prosecutor sees a journalist, he’ll follow his actual lead on corruption and not the sources. There’s a very important line between professional secrecy and personal secrecy. Personal privacy can be violated by the state if there are suspicions of corruption, of a serious crime – we all agreed to being part of the state. But professional secrecy is different.”

I think Victor’s right to think about what the state owes to us, and the lines it shouldn’t cross. It’s a really great example of how a story can create change just by getting bigger. When local journalists were stuck, national attention gave them new hope.

Now international attention may help Victor secure answers on exactly what the authorities were looking for when they followed him down the street. Hopefully this newsletter can be another torch helping shine a light for him and Luiza.

Until next week,