Breaking Down News: The Tailor of Panama

Interestingly, Bengali TV reporters kept a very suspicious eye on paramilitaries and police deployed to ensure a fair poll. ABP Ananda took serious objection to police on election duty entering rooms in which booths were located. They read it as a possibly threatening and coercive intrusion by the state, an indication of how readily the police can be used as a publicly-funded private army in West Bengal.

Meanwhile, the channel 24 Ghanta showed a video of paramilitaries buying shirts and pants in a Salboni store while polling was in progress. They may have been reserves, since they were totally unembarrassed by the camera gazing longingly at them. But Salboni is in Naxal country and those images set off a firestorm reeking of brimstone in studios across channels. It was enough to give Arnab Goswami a complex.

Doordarshan’s Janadesh programme spoke of a change of tune in the Trinamool Congress, with Mamata Banerjee publicly taking the sins of her party upon herself at a rally in Asansol. But the reporter on the ground spoiled all the fun by saying that it was all location, location, location. Bengalis divide the world into Bengalis and “non-Bengalis”, who can be from anywhere at all — Kanpur, Kathmandu, Saigon, Jhumritilaiya and Disneyland teem with non-Bengalis. So does this part of Asansol, where populations originally from Bihar might favour the BJP. And so the consummate artist in Didi played to the gallery. It isn’t quite the self-abasement that DD read into the rally. Millions, smarting from having their neighbourhoods painted blue and white, would love to see her go. But the Left and the Congress are not regarded as a brilliant alternative.

The Budget session has inspired a citizen response: Hasparliamentadjournedyet.com, whose motto is “Keep calm and baith jaiye”. It’s a bit contradictory, because the site is actually a call to action. Driven by what appears to be a varied bunch of people, it channelises the frustration of citizens who are tired of being innocent bystanders waiting to turn into roadkill as the Congress and the BJP take turns to bring Parliament to a halt. It lets you know when the two Houses are adjourned and provides handy links by which users can contact MPs and give them a piece of their mind.

Mossack Fonseca, which commodified secrecy, has become the world’s least secret company. Apparently, it’s on account of an unpatched plugin in its content management system, WordPress. The leak exploited a dated version of the Revolution slider, which yields up a command prompt to interested hackers. The vulnerability has been known from 2014, when it was published on Exploit-db.com. The admins who forgot to update their CMS also failed to notice 2.6 terabytes of data leaving the premises, a dump which dwarfs the caches which brought fame to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. With such technical incompetence, the future of digital journalism is assured. Wonder why no one is doing the next story, though: who was the hacker? He or she would be hard to trace, but surely not impossible? The internet has along and reliable memory.