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.
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