Help Me Investigate have sent Abbey Hartley to cover the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School, which starts today from 9am.
Speakers include former editor of Help Me Investigate Health, Alex Plough, the tax expert John Christensen; FOI specialists Paul Francis and Brendan Montague; and Andrew Jennings, the man behind investigations into the International Olympic Committee and FIFA
Watch out for her tweets @abbey_hartley and updates here on the Help Me Investigate blog.
European data journalism event #Dataharvest13 kicked off this year with a panel on European information laws. Host Brigitte Alfter kicked off the introductions:
And the Corporate Europe Observatory talked about their experiences of using information laws to look at lobbying interests:
Joao Sant’Anna talked about the European Ombudsman’s role in gaining access to documents held by public institutions:
And Scott Crosby provided a legal perspective:
For more coverage from the event see the links at the official site.
Help Me Investigate has compiled a list of MPs who operate throughout the UK.
The list has been scraped from the Parliament website.
The dataset shows the name, political party and constituency of all 674 MPs in the UK. In addition to this, a URL link to each MP’s biography has been displayed.
This information is also available on a Google spreadsheet.
If you use this information, please let us know – especially if any have been changed since publication. Continue reading
The investigation everyone was talking about at Dutch-Flemish data journalism event #Dataharvest13 was Offshore Leaks: a collaboration between over 80 journalists in dozens of countries on one of the biggest and ugliest data leaks in the history of journalism. The resulting stories on the use of tax havens have made front pages across the world and led to discussions – if not much action – at the G8.
David Leigh and Mar Cabra were involved in the investigation in the UK and Spain – in the audio below they talk about the issues they faced.
For more on Offshore Leaks follow live coverage of this weekend’s CIJ Summer School on the Help Me Investigate blog and contributor Abbey Hartley’s Twitter account @abbey_hartley.
Video of David Leigh talking afterwards is also embedded below:
One of the most interesting talks at the data and investigative journalism conference #Dataharvest13 was Gavin Sheridan‘s talk about how they tackled an Irish bank using laws on environmental information.
The bank in question was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, despite being Government-owned. But the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) applies differently, and Sheridan, along with Fred Logue, used those to request – then fight for – information on their involvement in property development.
Sheridan and Logue’s talk is split over three audio clips – embedded below:
This year’s Data Harvest festival – #dataharvest13 – featured a number of speakers involved in environmental investigations. We were there to record some fascinating speakers. Continue reading
Over on Help Me Investigate Health, we’ve published a list of Freedom of Information emails for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) – the new bodies controlling local health spending in England.
The list was compiled two months ago for Health Service Journal by Tom Warren and Matt Burgess, shortly after the new bodies took control, but is only now being published by HMI.
As part of the process, Matt and Tom also compiled a spreadsheet of CCG websites and FOI webpages.
Note: this is a lengthy post so you may want to get yourself comfortable!
There is more to leaking than Wikileaks, and a more interesting tale to be told than theirs. In This Machine Kills Secrets, Andy Greenberg looks at that story – and it’s an important read for any journalist interested in working with sources in the 21st century.
The book combines a history of the leaks movement – from cryptography geeks and early document sites like Cryptome – to an overview of the proliferation of new, Wikileaks-inspired sites from Al Jazeera’s leaks site to Unileaks – many of which lack basic security.
Along the way there are insights into every aspect of leaking: the technology, organisational and human factors, the politics and the culture. It’s a timely book as the world embarks on a debate about privacy, security, and transparency sparked by Edward Snowden’s own latest ‘megaleak’. Continue reading