Who’s afraid of Bulatlat?

Before leaving office, the Duterte administration took a final swipe at independent and critical media outlets and cause-oriented organizations.

On June 8, the National Telecommunications Commission ordered the blocking of their websites, on the basis of a letter from the national security adviser that branded them as “terrorists.”

One of the NTC-blocked websites is that of Bulatlat, which has been reporting since 2001 about communities and causes, advocacies and movements. It is where stories of farmers, workers, fisherfolk, the urban poor communities, national minorities, and other people in the “laylayan” get priority and preferential treatment.

This activist stance is unsurprising because Bulatlat was founded soon after the second People Power uprising, to fill the huge void left by sensational, personality-centered and commercialized media coverage.

Bulatlat’s activist reportage has been respected and recognized: by the Red Cross journalism awards, the Chit Estela Awards for Journalism; the Gawad Agong para sa Mamamahayag; and the Hildegarde Awards of St. Scholastica’s College. Bulatlat has won the top prizes in all of them.

Several stories have made it as finalists in the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards as well.

Today, Bulatlat is an authority on human rights reporting in the country, and is the Philippines’ longest-running online news website.

Prior to the NTC’s blocking of its website, Bulatlat had been the target of “distributed denial of service” attacks, which prevented the public from accessing it.

Last March 2022, a digital forensic investigation by the Sweden-based Qurium Foundation traced the attacks to a hackers group named Pinoy Vendetta.

According to Qurium, Pinoy Vendetta had used the same attack infrastructure against the websites of other independent online media outlets Rappler and Vera Files.

The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) gleefully praised the hackers.

In June 2021, Qurium also found that earlier DDOS attacks could be traced to the Philippine Army and the Department of Science and Technology.

Interestingly, Facebook had also separately found that the Philippine Army was behind a network of Facebook pages and accounts engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” pretending to be civilians in posting and promoting anti-communist content on the platform.

On Friday, July 8, Bulatlat went to court to challenge the NTC order.

Bulatlat managing editor Ronalyn Olea said in a statement sent to reporters: “We fight back against this new form of censorship.”

“The arbitrary blocking of websites maintained by civil society organizations and alternative media outfits including Bulatlat further unmasks the previous government’s policy to censor and censure dissent and opposition,” said the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), counsel for Bulatlat.

In a statement, the NUPL said that “the NTC order finds no basis in law. Nowhere in the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) of 2020 has the NTC, the National Security Adviser, the National Security Council or the Anti-Terrorism Council been given the power to block cybertraffic nor content data more so if based on reckless suspicions of terrorist activities nor due to conclusory claims of alleged affiliations with designated individuals or groups. Even the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 does not permit such state action.”

Bulatlat’s 11-page petition asks the court to to issue a temporary restraining order against the NTC order, and upon notice hearing, issue a writ of preliminary injunction.

The NTC order, Bulatlat asserts, “constitutes censorship and prior restraint or subsequent punishment, as the case may be, on the past, present, and future news as well as the editorial content of Bulatlat.com”

No notice or hearing was given prior to NTC’s order to block Bulatlat. No due process.

Human rights, journalism, press freedom and internet freedom organizations, foreign and domestic, have condemned the NTC order and demanded that Bulatlat be left alone to freely practice journalism.

President Marcos has not spoken about Bulatlat’s takedown, the cases against Rappler and the denial of ABS-CBN franchise application. His press secretary meanwhile has prioritized a plan to give media accreditation to vloggers some of who are known peddlers of disinformation. Would Marcos be as afraid of journalism and press freedom as Duterte?