Joel Simon, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, writes about the safety of journalists for CJR.


In the upcoming movie Rosewater, which tells the story of the 2009 arrest journalist Maziar Bahari, a laptop sits on the table during the interrogation session and serves as a source of unending information for his captors, from personnel contacts to Facebook “likes.” The movie, the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, opens next week.

Some of the information extracted from the computer is almost comical. In one scene, Rosewater, played with chilling intensity by the Danish actor Kim Bodhia, grills Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal) on his association with Anton Chekhov, whom Rosewater assumes to be Zionist spy. “Who is he?” Rosewater rails at Bahari. “Tell me. You indicated an interest in him on Facebook.”

But the implications are not at all funny. In fact, the standard email and social media account contains the kind of information that interrogators used to pull out fingernails to get—your friends; your colleagues; your associations; you private opinions; your political beliefs.

Bahari, who is from Iran but lived in London, had returned home to cover the 2009 presidential elections for Newsweek and Britain’s Channel 4. He was arrested and falsely accused of espionage as part of the elaborate Iranian government plot to blame the post-election protests on outside agitators. I worked closely with Newsweek and Bahari’s wife Paola to support an international campaign that eventually won his release. But it wasn’t until I met Bahari in New York in November 2009 and had the chance to speak with him at length about his interrogation that I fully grasped the implications.

Much has been made of the role of social media in fomenting the Green Revolution that followed Iran’s 2009 presidential election. But there has been much less attention paid to the way that Iranian authorities used social networks to reverse engineer the protest movement, surreptitiously populating Facebook and using passwords extracted by force to establish connections and relationships.

For me, the Bahari case was an object lesson in the limitations of using technology to confront autocratic regimes. It also served as a wake-up call to journalists about the importance of safeguarding electronic information. Later this year, CPJ will update its 2012 Journalist Security Guide with a more detailed section on information security.

The situation has only grown more urgent since Bahari’s interrogation. In many parts of the world, government interrogators confiscate all electronic equipment from journalists and others that they capture and immediately demand passwords. So do non-state actors, ranging from drug traffickers in Mexico to militant groups in Syria. Interrogators from the Islamic State, which has brutally kidnapped dozens of journalists, “seized their laptops, cellphones and cameras and demanded the passwords to their accounts,” according to the October 25 account by Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times.

There are of course other less vicious methods for obtaining information than pulling people off the streets—hacking operations, or the use of sophisticated software to implant malware, copy hard drives, and monitor communication.

While repressive governments and militant groups pose the most direct threat, you don’t have to work in a police state or war zone to worry about information security. The NSA’s surveillance programs have given US authorities access to a huge portion of all global internet traffic, including the correspondence of journalists. US journalists have some legal protections, but international journalists do not. In fact, a former NSA official told me recently that communications between a Pakistani journalist and her sensitive sources, for example, is precisely the kind of the intelligence the spy agencies are looking for.

Joel Simon is a CJR columnist and the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.