Spying on journalists raises red flag about police attitudes
Revelations expose culture where threats await those who tread on sensitive topics
MONTREAL— For journalists, scandal is good for business. There is news to report, revelations to uncover, people to hold accountable.
But when it emerged this week that police in Quebec had been spying on journalists’ phone calls — for up to five years in some cases — the scandal hit a bit too close to home.
So far, up to 10 reporters from at least five different news organizations have been identified as having been spied on by the police, leading the provincial government to call a public inquiry into the matter.
“When you hear about this happening, you worry that it may have happened elsewhere or that it could happen elsewhere. That’s why it’s very important that we deal with these particular incidents right away,” Sukanya Pillay, executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, told the Star.
The ball got rolling when Patrick Lagacé, a columnist with Montreal’s La Presse, learned that incoming and outgoing calls from his iPhone had been monitored by local police investigators between January and July of this year.
In the course of a probe into an officer suspected of leaking sensitive information, investigators also had permission to activate his telephone’s GPS — to track his movements in real time.
A judge ruled Friday morning that the information obtained by police should be sealed until a request to retrieve details about his journalistic activities can be heard by the courts. But on Saturday it was revealed that police also had a warrant to listen to phone calls between Lagacé and La Presse colleague Vincent Larouche.
In a statement, Montreal police insisted that no one other than the officers under investigation had been subject to a wiretap.
The outrage and denunciations of the affair have been swift. Police forces throughout Quebec were sent combing through their archives to ensure they hadn’t done the same thing.
Except they had — this is not just Lagacé’s story.
The result was the discovery of a more egregious case in which investigators with the Sûreté du Québec got judicial authority in 2013 to comb through the phone records of three Radio-Canada journalists for a fiveyear period going back to 2008.
Police with the SQ wanted to know who had leaked a wiretap recording from a criminal investigation to the broadcaster’s flagship investigative program, Enquête. It was a serious criminal breach.
But the net investigators had cast would have given them a haul of contacts for confidential journalistic sources on issues such as corruption, organized crime, political malfeasance and even sources within their own force.
“It makes me sick,” Alain Gravel, the former host of Enquête, tweeted last week.
It also left a nasty taste in the mouth of the SQ’s current director, Martin Prud’homme, who took up the post just two years ago and knew nothing of what had happened until he ordered and received on Tuesday the results of a search going back 20 years.
Prud’homme declared in an interview with Radio-Canada that he believes strongly in freedom of the press and the need to protect journalistic sources. He said he would never have allowed such investigative tactics to be used.
“I agree with the fact that there was a police investigation. That’s an obligation. My predecessor took the right decision to investigate, but it’s how it was carried out that was a problem.”
Prud’homme would appear to be a minority viewpoint in an insular police culture that can quickly turn threatening and vindictive for those who push too far into sensitive areas, said Stéphane Berthomet, a former police investigator in France who is currently a criminal analyst for Radio-Canada and Montreal-based author and screenwriter.
His past life as a police officer and his current membership with Quebec’s association of independent journalists give him a unique perspective on both sides of the debate over police activity and press freedom.
While he admits that monitoring journalists to advance a criminal investigation that is drawing headlines may be the easiest way to get at the information, that doesn’t make it right.
“Hitting a person is an easier way to get them to talk than finding evidence. Putting drugs in someone’s pocket is an easier way to arrest them than finding out where they’re hidden,” Berthomet said, adding that obtaining a five-year record of a journalist’s telephone calls would appear to go far beyond the quest to identify a single source.
“I think it is the demonstration of a profound lack of respect by government organizations for the independence and the work of journalists and I think it demonstrates a culture that says, ‘If you embarrass us, if you pose a problem, we will do everything to put a spoke in your wheel.’ ”
When Montreal police Chief Philippe Pichet addressed the matter last Monday, he cast the leak investigation that gave rise to the scandal as a situation in which investigators were forced to balance two competing obligations — respecting press freedoms and upholding the law.
“When there are criminal allegations against an officer you have to use all the means at your disposal to clear the air and make a report to the director of criminal prosecutions,” he said.
But even though Pichet said his officers followed the necessary rules and their application for a search warrant was ultimately approved by a justice of the peace, his interpretation of the law needs to be adjusted, said Pillay of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
“If the police have problems with what’s going on inside their own house they have to look inside their house to determine that,” she said.
“There is a public interest in ensuring that our police forces are run effectively to keep us safe, but there is an equal public interest in ensuring that freedom of the press is protected. You can’t sacrifice one for the other.”