Miami (December 13, 2012).- An online attack on the Panama newspaper La Estrella that upset its normal functioning and access to information brought a strong protest today from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), which called on the authorities to conduct an immediate investigation.
The president of the El Siglo & La Estrella Editorial Group, Eduardo Quirós, told the IAPA that La Estrella’s Web site, www.laestrella.com.pa, was hacked yesterday starting at 5:50 p.m. and for three long hours visitors were not able to access the news.
Quirós, who is also regional vice chairman for Panama of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, explained that the hackers “were seeking to harm the media’s servers, as they had introduced a code that changed the configuration of the Web site’s format and the notes contained a strange text that prevented the ability to read them properly.” The adulterated information on the site was also sent on to La Estrella’s Twitter account.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, repudiated this act of vandalism and said, “It not only disrupted the normal dissemination of the newspaper’s online version but also it was a hindrance for the distribution of the information and restricted the readers’ right to seek, receive and access information they are interested in, so these events must be investigated promptly.”
Quirós said that the invasion of the online service – now re-established – “reveals high levels of specialization and a clear intent to disrupt the normal operation” of the newspaper. He stressed that this was “an attack on freedom of the press which does not scare us in the slightest.”
The attack occurred following the publication on December 10 on the paper’s Web site of a controversial video (http://bit.ly/kzYEKW) containing unedited images of the return to Panama of former (1983-1989) dictator Manuel Noriega, in which questions are raised about the hardly professional and fraternal treatment by those that carried out the operation, among them current Security Deputy Minister Manuel Moreno. This return-to-the-country operation has been criticized on social media.
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, also referred to Principle 5 of the IAPA-inspired Declaration of Chapultepec, which states, “Prior censorship, restrictions on the circulation of the media or dissemination of their reports, forced publication of information, the imposition of obstacles to the free flow of news, and restrictions on the activities and movements of journalists directly contradict freedom of the press.”
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
