E-Media Tidbits

employment.gov.nl Employees of this Dutch minister illegitimately accessed a news agency's editorial system.

In mid-2006, officials at the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs accessed the online editorial system of the Geassocieerde Pers Diensten (GPD), the leading news agency of many of the provincial papers in the Netherlands. GPD calls it espionage and published the story on Saturday. The ministry has acknowledged the unauthorized access and announced unspecified measures.

According to GPD, the ministry had access to Web pages intended for GPD-subscribing newspapers -- which means they could read unpublished articles and agendas, although they could not alter the articles. The news agency became suspicious after the ministry asked questions about an interview with its minister, Jan Piet Hein Donner that had not yet been published.

The ministry logged in almost daily, said the GDP. The news agency fears that other ministries might have done the same and calls it a severe infringement of press freedom.

A severe case of sloppy protection of an editorial system seems also a justified qualification, I think.

U.K. news site The Register dismissed this flap as "a storm in a tea cup," claiming that "the account was used by just one person at [the ministry's] communications department, a former GPD journalist, who apparently still had access to the database."

However, there appears to be much more to the story. According to Dutch media, both spokespersons of the minister and the vice-minister have been entering GDP's system hundreds times. These spokespeople were former GDP journalists who, when their passwords were disabled, obtained the password of another system user.