Hide My Ass! Interviews Tamas Bodoky

On March 18th 2015, Index on Censorship hosted its yearly Freedom of Expression Awards. The event recognises individuals and groups whose impact on tackling censorship worldwide is paramount. Privax had the honour of sponsoring the Freedom of Expression Awards. In addition, we were pleased to give the winners digital security training that will help them bypass surveillance and censorship measures wherever they are.

More often than not the stories behind those extraordinary individuals escape the mainstream press in favour of bigger headlines. One such story is about Tamas Bodoky, winner of the 2015 Digital Activism Award. Bodoky is the editor in chief and founder of atlatszo.hu, a watchdog NGO and investigative journalism website that has rocked the Hungarian government with its breaking stories. Atlatszo–the name means “transparent”–specializes in investigative journalism and advocating information access. Its Facebook page has over 62,000 fans and their website receives more than 300,000 unique visitors a month. Due to the secretive nature of Hungarian politics, Atlatszo has spearheaded Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in the country. It has handled over 5000 requests; filing more than 100 court applications of this nature and winning 60% of them. As a result, the governing majority introduced a bill to curtail FOI legislation which was dubbed ‘Lex Atlatszo’.


Atlatszo’s first legal achievement was to get reporters’ privilege, the journalists’ right to withhold the identity of confidential sources recognized by the media law of Hungary. Among their other achievements is a Crowdsourced Bribe Tracker; an online tool for average citizens to report their experiences of everyday corruption by providing details of the time, place and amount of a witnessed bribe.

After the Freedom of Expression Awards, I had a unique opportunity to speak to Tamas Bodoky and shed light on the website’s beginning, its goals and outlook for the future.

Mahmoud Hamdy: How would you describe Atlatszo?
Tamas Bodoky: Atlatszo.hu is a watchdog NGO and online news site for investigative journalism to promote transparency and freedom of information in Hungary. It produces investigative reports, accepts information from whistleblowers, files freedom of information requests, and commences freedom of information lawsuits in cases where its requests are refused. Atlatszo.hu operates a Tor-based anonymous whistleblowing platform (Magyarleaks), a freedom of information request generator for the general public (Kimittud), and a crowdsourced platform to report everyday corruption anonymously (Fizettem).

MH: When and why did you start Atlatszo?
TB: We started atlatszo.hu in 2011, because we think that mainstream media became biased in Hungary. In the past decade mainstream media in Hungary has become a tool of political and economic interest groups, and it is often not the journalists, but the owners of the media and politicians who decide what can be published, and what can become an issue in a publication. The result is a very limited freedom of the press in Hungary. There are many taboos, many important stories remain untold, and numerous corruption cases go undisclosed, even if there are whistleblowers and they have evidence.

MH: How are you funded?
TB: 50% crowdfunding with small donations and “subscriptions” of 3 EUR a month. 50% big international donors like the Open Society Foundations, Norway NGO Fund, Fritt Ord.
MH: How important is unrestricted internet access to you?
TB: Very important, this is an entirely internet based organisation.We are aware of increasing state surveillance of the internet, what makes us worry, especially regarding source protection, since we communicate with some of our sources online.

MH: For a bit of a local context, can you please tell us how difficult is it to publish critical stories in mainstream domestic media? And, which ones had Atlatszo published that gained most attention?
TB: The first problem is that mainstream media is lacking the resources to do journalistic research. If that is done by someone else – like atlatszo.hu or investigative journalists working elsewhere – mainstream media might pick up the story. This is happening very often to us, the most important pieces being about how the political elite or the friends and family of the prime minister are directing public funds into private enterprises via hijacked public tenders. For individual stories visit their website.

MH: How have the people reacted in Hungary after you published controversial stories such as state control of the media?
TB: Hungary is deeply divided politically, some people become our fans, others are smearing us, depending on their political standpoint. It is hard to have a rational discussion about facts in Hungary, everything is over-politicized.

MH: Have you had any pressure from local and/or regional authorities?
TB: We experienced a smear campaign calling us foreign agents and even traitors by the government funded media, and one of our institutional donors, the local Norway NGO Fund was scrutinized by the authorities.

MH: What is the main criticism that you have faced in the past?
TB: Being politically biased or serving the political opposition. This is not the case, we regularly publish stories on the left-liberal parties and politicians wrongdoings. However, since the conservatives are in power, most of our stories cover governmental corruption. Nowadays it is mostly the foreign funding, what gets criticized.

MH: How do you deal with this criticism?
TB: About being politically biased: we communicate about our past work under the socialist governments of the past, when our journalists, including myself, did expose that governments corruption as well. About foreign funding: first we made jokes about it, like the infamous “Soros Army” T-shirts. At the same time we speeded up our crowdfunding campaigns to reach more than 50% crowdfunding, what we successfully achieved last year. That means we have a local constituency willing to pay for our free content, we have thousands of committed local supporters.

MH: Have your stories resulted in policy change in on the EU level?/ Did someone reach out to you from Brussels for more insight on some of the big stories you’ve unearthed?
TB: We know from sources that we are noticed and have an informal impact on the EU level, but we are not aware of any formal policy changes, and we don’t have formal contacts in Brussels. However, our stories sometimes trigger investigations on the EU level as well, as it happened in the case of PM Viktor Orbán’s son in law, whose company won huge amounts of EU funds on hijacked public tenders.


MH: What is next for you?
TB: I am dedicated to run the org and stabilize or even increase funding at the current, 200,000 USD per year level. We intend to raise the percentage of crowdfunding and other incomes to 70%, and reduce OSF funding to 30% in order to avoid donor-dependence and legitimacy issues. We wish to attract more and more experienced investigative journalists to work with us, to increase the number of readers, have more impact on public life in Hungary.