From WikiLeaks

January 8, 2009

By Robert Laing (The Times: On The Money)

The most interesting thing the brouhaha over the uncensored Competition Commission report on banking has brought to light is fledgling “open source” investigative journalism project wikileaks.org.

The website uses the same software as Wikipedia, tweaked to make whistleblowers untraceable. The veracity of leaked documents is checked by volunteer journalists much like Wikipedia uses volunteer encyclopaedists.

Wikileaks’s website states: “We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.”

According to Wikileaks, it created the “unredacted” version of the commission’s banking report by simply downloading the version found on www.compcom.co.za and then decrypting it.

The commission claims whoever un-blacked out portions of its file transgressed South Africa’s Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. The commission has called for the whistleblower to be hunted down and prosecuted.

Problem is, the perpetrator may live in any country with Internet access, and courts in a more technically savvy country are unlikely to be sympathetic to an organisation that left confidential information in a freely downloadable file.

Sadly, by trying to prosecute Wikileaks, a government organisation here is again showing the “new” South Africa to be a country on the wrong side of the digital divide. Wikileaks is ultimately a force of enlightenment and modernity, against which the incumbent government is simply going to look authoritarian and unenlightened.

Interestingly, instead of lauding what looks to be the most exciting citizen journalism project the Internet has produced so far, local newspaper hacks have tended to regurgitate the commission’s line that the people behind Wikileaks are “criminals” who deserve to be prosecuted.

Wikileaks’ “About” page explains the site is still a work in progress. The Competition Commission’s efforts to prosecute whoever cracked its portable document format (pdf) file will possibly be its first big test.

Reading the blue highlighted sections that were blacked out in the original version the Competition Commission put on its website begs the question: why was it censored in the first place?

The report said: “The Commission pointed out that the Enquiry would be on the record, which would be made public subject only to the protection of genuinely confidential information as provided for in the Competition Act.”

The uncensored version shows the commission allowed the banks to remove public domain information such as price comparisons — ironic considering a key charge made by the commission is that banks obfuscate their charges.

One eye-opener is that FNB upped its ATM revenue by 11 percent after following the other banks in charging in per-R100 bands instead of a fixed percentage.

Some of the censored text is simply embarrassingly lame excuses from the banks on why their profit margins are higher than would be possible among properly competing players.

The report can be downloaded from: http://www.wikileaks.org/leak/uncensored-competition-commission-report-on-banking.pdf

First appeared in The Times. Thanks to Robert Laing and The Times covering this topic. Copyright remains with the aforementioned. Contact The Times for reprint rights.

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