TR EMERITUS

From our Correspondent In a speech directed at visiting delegates from the New York State Bar Association, Singapore Law Minister Shanmugan complained that the Singapore media was unfairly ranked by international media watchdog Reporters without Borders. Mr Shanmugam cannot understand why Singapore was ranked in a pathetic 133th position below Kenya, Congo and Guinea in terms of press freedom. Instead of complaining, whining and lamenting, why not think of feasible ways to improve the Singapore media's rankings? The Temasek Review has taken the initiative to compile a proposal for Mr Shanmugan's kind consideration which will surely increase the Singapore's ranking to within 100 next year if the ideas contained therein are all implemented within a year: 1. Repeal or amend the Newspaper Printing and Press Act The Newspaper Printing and Press Act (NPPA) came about in 1974, replacing the Printing Presses Ordinance which the PAP government had inherited from the British. The NPPA requires that no newspapers are to be printed or published without a permit. This permit is granted, refused or revoked upon the Minister’s discretion. Also, the permit can be granted but “subject to conditions to be endorsed thereon.” The NPPA requires anyone who wants to “keep and use a press for the printing of documents” to get a licence, and this licence can be withdrawn, indefinitely or otherwise. It is time to deregulate the print media industry to allow the emergence of different players to compete with one another which will surely lead to an overall improvement in the standard of journalism in Singapore. Instead of the giving the minister the sole discretion to grant a permit, it should be decided by a committee consisting of civil servants, journalists, opposition MPs and other industry players. A series of rules and regulations should be promulgated to determine if the applicant qualifies for a permit. The government should adopt a hands-off approach and let the industry players self-regulate themselves. 2. Break SPH into different smaller companies With the sole exception of MediaCorp's daily freesheet Today, all daily newspapers including the flagship Straits Times are printed by Singapore Press Holdings, whose management shareholders are appointed by the government in accordance with the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act of 1974. The Chairman of SPH is always a former PAP minister by default with the incumbent being former deputy prime minister Dr Tony Tan. While current shareholding structure does not imply direct governmental control on media content, their active presence promotes self-censorship amongst journalists. The lack of a serious competitor has led to the breeding of a sense of complacency within SPH which will result in stagnation and ossification eventually. SPH is like a cartel which enjoys a complete monopoly over the print media industry in Singapore. It would have fallen afoul of anti-trust laws in the United States. The government can consider introducing such a law to break up the monopoly of SPH. The non-media related businesses of SPH such as property (Times Development Ltd) should be spun off from the main company to be independent entities. The different language papers should form separate companies on their own to run their respective publications. Similarly, the internet sites owned by SPH should be sold to smaller new media companies like ours to level the playing field. The government should allow market forces to decide on the success of each individual company and should not intervene to pop up struggling companies. 3. Reform the harsh defamation laws Singapore has one of the harshest defamation laws in the world which gives many the impression that they were used liberally to cripple the government's critics financially. In a damning indictment of the Singapore's defamation laws, a report from the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute said: “Another area in which the independence of the judiciary is of concern is the cases involving the courts hearing defamation claims initiated by PAP officials……the slim likelihood of the successful defence of an action, combined with the extraordinarily high damages awarded in defamation cases involving PAP officials sheds doubt on the independence of the judiciary in these cases. The courts in defamation cases have substantial discretion in awarding judgment and damages. Under Orders 14 (Summary Judgment) and 78 (Defamation Actions), the court has substantial discretion to resolve the case without a hearing in open court and to permit the quantum of damages to be determined by a Registrar in chambers.” Orders 14 and 78 should be revoked which shifts the burden of proof to the plaintiff that the statement made is defamatory and damaging to his/her reputation. The defendant must be given a chance in court to defend himself/herself. In a landmark case last year, Justice Belinda Ang awarded more than $600,000 to the Lees against SDP leader Dr Chee Soon Juan for defaming the Singapore government via a summary judgment. While the aggrieved leaders should be given a recourse to justice, the punishment meted out must not be putative in nature to deprive the defendants of their livelihoods. A limit should be imposed on the awards granted in cases of defamation, e.g. not more than $10,000. In 2004, then Taiwanese President Chen Shui Bian was awarded a token $NT1 for winning a defamation lawsuit against a political opponent. As the Law Minister, Mr Shanmugam is in a perfect position to amend and abolish these unreasonable laws to make them more in line with the standard practices adopted by modern democracies, most notably our closest competitor Hong Kong. Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang came under attack in the Hong Kong media lately for allegations of favoritism towards his relatives. Though he has dismissed the reports as "pure fabrications", he did not take any legal action to sue the journalists responsible for them. In fact, his combative stance was questioned by lawmakers who said he should not casually dismiss public opinion, especially when some key questions remained unanswered. Perhaps the most important "reform" Mr Shanmugam should undertake is to remind and convince his parliamentary colleagues that monitoring the government and public figures is a duty of the media and they should not resort to taking legal action too easily to "defend" their reputations. Respect has to be earned and it is never gained by suing and bankrupting one's critics even if one is proven right in the court of law.  Read More →

From our Correspondent When asked by a Potong Pasir resident if the PAP has any plans to win back the constitutency from opposition MP Chiam See Tong, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the problem had to be looked at in a 'detached way', and that no easy solution existed. While there is the need to look after those in Potong Pasir who voted for the PAP, the party must be careful not to be taken advantage of, he said, recalling the 2006 election. "We took the approach of doing more for the opposition wards so they would be grateful and vote for the PAP. And Mr Chiam went around saying, 'Why don't you continue voting for me? Then you'll have two MPs for the price of one'. After the experience, it was decided that the PAP would change the way it treated Potong Pasir," he added. The PAP which controlled the government's purse strings, had repeatedly denied the necessary upgrading to the two opposition wards of Potong Pasir and Hougang though the residents living there pay taxes to the government like the rest of Singapore. Estate upgrading, which includes installing lifts on every floor to correct a design lapse in earlier flats built by HDB, has been indiscriminately by the ruling party to "entice" voters to vote for them, a Singapore-style pork barrel politics in practice. As 86 per cent of Singaporeans live in public housing built by HDB, a government agency, they have little choice but to depend on the "goodwill" of the ruling party to upgrade their flats which will see a rise in the asset values. Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong once threatened the residents of Hougang and Potong Pasir that their estates will be turned into "slums" of Singapore if they continue to vote for the opposition. Though both opposition wards are denied upgrading by the ruling party, they appear to be better run than the PAP wards. Last year, the PAP Town Councils lost more than $10 million dollars of their sinking funds in risky investments involving structure-linked products. The two opposition Town Councils did not lose a single cent as their management committees have been prudent enough not to park their funds at safer places. The PAP has been trying ways and means to undermine the authority and work of the opposition MPs in their wards via appointing "grassroots advisers" who are actually losing PAP candidates in the last election to interfere with their work. For example, PAP grassroots adviser in Hougang shocked the entire nation by announcing in a press conference that he had "brought" the Lift Upgrading Program (LUP) to Hougang instead of its MP Low Thia Kiang. The National Development Ministry then gave a lame excuse through its press secretary Mr Lim Yuin Chien that it is the government's practice to work with PAP-appointed grassroots advisers as opposition MPs are not "accountable" to the government. However, the Town Councils Act (CAP 329A) stated clearly that the minister had to work with the respective Town Councils to implement LUP on the ground. There was no mention of the roles of grassroots advisers. The ruling party has remained surprisingly silent on the matter. Given that the PAP enjoys easy access to state resources by virtue of its incumbency, it will be forever an uphill task for the opposition to win more seats in the elections which explains why the PAP is able to maintain its political hegemony for well over five decades.  Read More →

From our Correspondent [Read our latest rebuttal to Mr Geoffrey Pereira's second article on 13 November 2009 here] [Read our rebuttal to Mr Geoffrey Pereira''s reply to this article here and here] The Temasek Review site was down for almost 8 hours on 30 October 2009 from a massive DDOS or distributed denial of service attack. (read the details here) * A DDOS attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. * An IP address is a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network utilizing the internet protocol for communication between its nodes which helps in host and location identification. To check your own IP, just go to http://whatismyipaddress.com and it will reveal your IP address in an instance. IP addresses are usually displayed in human-readable notations, such as 208.77.188.166. On or about 31st October 2009,  around 2200 hours to 1st November 0100 hours, while our system administrator was doing a routine check on the server and firewall, he noticed a flurry of network communication requests coming from one single IP address concurrently which caused our server's load to increase tremendously. Attached below is a snapshot of the apache-server status log which shows the IP addresses which have been accessing our site. As you can see from the above snapshot, all but two of the IP addresses came from the same source - 203.116.231.234 which was traced back to Singapore Press Holdings as per http://whois.domaintools.com/203.116.231.234 The IP address belonging to SPH appeared to be accessing our entire site indiscriminately, reading even our archived contents from as early as 2008. (boxed in red) The actual number is much higher and cannot be revealed in its entirety here due to its length. From the log, it seems to suggest that whoever doing that is using a Web Grabber Software with the aim of getting all the content from our site since a single web browser is unlikely to be reading our entire site all at a go. Fortunately, our new anti-DDOS firewall managed to stop these requests to prevent them from loading the server thus causing it to slow down. A shared server with limited bandwidth would have crashed. The situation is akin to somebody making a thousand phone calls one after another continuously to your handphone which will jam your line and prevent other people from reaching you, not quite unlike a DDOS attack. We would like to ask SPH the following questions: 1. Who is the culprit using a SPH-owned computer to "grab" our content from as early as March 2008 when the postings can be viewed from our site in the public domain? 2. Why is he/she doing copying our site in its entirety? Is it for his/her personal reading at his/her own pleasure or is it for some other more insidious purposes? 3. What is he/she going to with the content from our site? Will it be plagiarized and reproduced elsewhere at a later date? If SPH journalists are really interested to learn more about Temasek Review, they can email us to request a copy of our backlog files which will save them the trouble of "grabbing" the content directly from the server. By doing so covertly without asking for our permission and flooding our server with so many network communications request at one go, it will slow down the site, retard the loading speed of the pages and can potentially cause the server to crash (though highly unlikely in our new dedicated server). Is this how SPH operates, under a cloak of secrecy? Or is it a response to our increasing readership? Though our server has been "strengthened" following the last DDOS attack, we are very concerned about possible "intrusions" like this again from SPH or other government agencies which will increase our server load unnecessarily such that it may not be able to respond during periods where the traffic may doubled or even tripled. We sincerely urge SPH to come forward and explain their actions publicly not only to us, but to the entire blogosphere as well. We will be most willing to sit down and listen to what they have to say over a cup of tea and resolve the issue together to achieve a win-win situation for both parties. However, if it chooses to remain recalcitrant and continue their unwanted and unwelcome "intrusions" to undermine our site, then we will have no choice but to escalate the matter up to the relevant authorities. We would like to remind the SPH journalists involved of Section 7 of the Computer Misuse Act (CAP 50A): 7. —(1) Any person who, knowingly and without authority or lawful excuse — (a) interferes with, or interrupts or obstructs the lawful use of, a computer; or (b) impedes or prevents access to, or impairs the usefulness or effectiveness of, any program or data stored in a computer, shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $10,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years or to both and, in the case of a second or subsequent conviction, to a fine not exceeding $20,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years or to both. SysAdmin's Note: Time of the incident have been amended to tally with server logs and data provided by our DC. There was a differences of a few hours from time of incident till it was actually reported, hence the discrepencies.  Read More →