UPDATED Uproar over BNS in Lithuania, strange silence over police actions in Latvia

There is shit going down in the Baltics and everyone reading this (yeah, the both of you and the lady who stumbled in here from the blog next door with that arrow icon thing) should know about.

There has been reporting already on the bizarre events in Lithuania. Seems that a while ago, the Lithuanian president Dalia Grybuskaite mentioned (while in Latvia at a Baltic presidents’ summit) that it looked like someone, probably Russia, was planning a disinformation campaign against Lithuania and her in particular. The reasons were easy to guess - Lithuania holding the presidency of the European Union (EU) and moving along with the process of bringing Ukraine closer to the EU (on behalf of the whole EU, not some nefarious Lithuanian plot). Well, Putin’s Russia will be Putin’s Russia, no surprise there.

What was surprising is that after this possible Russian disinformation plot was reported by the Baltic News Service (BNS), citing intelligence sources, it was confirmed by President Grybuskaite and, apparently, by the head of the intelligence service. Nonetheless, since the story was first reported based on “leaked” intelligence information, an investigation was launched by the Lithuanian authorities to find the source of the leak.

On November 7, about a week after the first reports of the alleged disinformation plot, agents of the Lithuanian Special Investigation Service (SIS) descended on the BNS office in Vilnius and on a small office that BNS keeps at the Seimas, or Lithuanian parliament. Six journalists and editors were interogated, one had her home searched in the presence of her children and a lawyer called in by BNS. Neither the editor nor the lawyer were allowed to communicate with anyone for six hours. Computers and a phone or two were seized.

As my colleague Mike Collier wrote, it was almost as if Lithuania had beat the Russians to discrediting itself by intimidating journalists and creating an international scandal (I wrote about it for The Wall Street Journal). Even Lithuania’s Prime Minister Algridas Butkevicius, who was confronted with the raid on BNS when attending a Baltic prime ministers meeting in Riga, later said the action was excessive. A political firestorm ensued, and it also emerged that the SIS had questioned journalists at the news portal Delfi.lv and IQ magazine.
In an update, I have learned that the SIS agents "completely tore apart" the home of one female editor in the presence of her children. She was not used to such treatment (it has been more than 20 years since the Soviet KGB did this kind of thing to people in the Baltic countries) and suffered a severe psychological trauma. 

So much for Lithuania, but there is also strange news from Latvia. My version (based on various sources) is as follows:

Latvian Television reported, on September 23, that a document had been drafted in connection with the state’s dispute with air Baltic’s former (and deposed) CEO Berthold Flick stating that a possible solution to the dispute would be to settle it with the former executive for some LVL 16 million. The restricted access or confidential document was routinely prepared by lawyers outlining various resolutions of the dispute – probably including litigating the issue before an arbitration tribunal with all the costs that implies and the risk of losing a large sum if the tribunal found for Flick. The following day, the State Chancellery, from which the document was reportedly leaked, said the leak was apparently aimed at pressuring the government to take this course of action. The Chancellery did not deny the substance of the document.

What follows I have pieced together:

Security Police visited both the Ministry of Justice and the State Chancellery to find out how the leak happened. This was, to some degree, legitimate, as it is the duty of state employees to keep confidential documents confidential.

The Security Police was also in contact with Latvian Television, specifically, those responsible for the September 23 news item. At some point, by exerting pressure and threats, something (a document) was obtained that, in all likelihood, contained enough information to trace it back to the source. In other words, it would appear that Latvian Television may have burned its source, though it says that it did not. LTV officials do not deny that something was given to the Security Police, but say that they protected their sources.

So far, well.. so, so. But it is also disturbing that little or nothing was written about the rather extensive activities of the Security Police to track down a leak to the media. Normally, any contact by national security services with the media should be taken very seriously – overreported, rather than underreported- especially in light of disclosures about global surveillance by the American NSA, the detention of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda by the British security service and the attempts to silence Wikileaks.

This has to change.

Latvia - A police state ultra-lite?

Is Latvia turning into a police state lite with a creeping chilling effect on free expression and, perhaps, on free behavior in general?  There are some disturbing signs. On August 20, private security guards detained, according to one version, six persons who tried to collect signatures against the punishment handed down to the Russian performance artists (for lack of a better word) Pussy Riot. Three women dressed similarly to the Pussy Riot members  and three men were detained outside the Skonto Arena, where a concert was taken place. They were then turned over to the “regular” policemen, who, after a while, told all those detained that they had committed no violation and were free to go. Before that, some placards carried by the women were taken away and, it seems, given back only when the detainees left after the concert.

That, it seems, would have been the end of it, but now the young women have been summoned by the police again, to be officially informed that no charges will be brought against them. A strange formality to say the least, and with an undertone of – we are in control here, we tell you what to do.  Nicely, of course, with even the official police spokesperson saying that calling the girls to the police station was a courteous gesture that shouldn’t be misunderstood.

There was more before that. Activist Didzis Melbiksis, who has also been a radio journalist, organized a parody march just ahead of the Riga Pride in June, in which he and several other persons (all of them, by the way, supporters of gay rights) carried a large symbolic phallus from near the Freedom Monument to a nearby club. The march had been announced and permitted by the authorities. Nonetheless, the Riga Municipal Police chose to question Melbiksis and other participants, ask them for identification and the like.

Last fall, just after the extraordinary elections to the parliament or Saeima, Three persons spontaneously protesting against the actions of a political party and three bystanders were detained by Latvian police in the capital Riga on October 5 and taken to a police station for "identification". There they had a sign written on a sheet and a t-shirt with a slogan on it confiscated. According to media reports, the police gave no reason for confiscating the items, one of which was a sheet with a slogan labeling former Latvian president Valdis Zatlers "a traitor" and the t-shirt with a handwritten slogan "Zatlers, have you no shame?" in Latvian.

So-called administrative charges were filed against all six persons detained in connection with the protest and they could have faced jail term of up to 15 days and fines of up to LVL 25. To be honest, I don’t know how this case ended, but it was yet another case of police repression against spontaneous, non-violent political expression. The same as what the private security guards, perhaps with a tad more basis in law (a “private” public space) for restricting the behavior of people near a large event, did to the Pussy Riot petitioners.

What this is beginning to add up to is that Latvia is, and perhaps always has been, a kind of police state lite  or even ultralite , but just heavy enough to have the chilling effect on spontaneous expression protest that, at least back in the day, the US Supreme Court, would use as an argument for knocking down laws, ordinances and police actions that had precisely that kind of chilling effect on free speech that the actions of Latvian police have had.

Given the general undercurrent of indifference toward or even agreement with the way Pussy Riot has been treated in Russia, it is no surprise that certain forms of repression are accepted as normal in Latvia. Indeed, given the widespread mentality of if I don’t like it, I don’t care if it is repressed it is surprising that the police don’t take more advantage of the latitude that society gives them.  Perhaps some of the police – the younger, better educated ones – have acquired the skills of modern, Western-style policing. That would be a good sign. But it would be still better if society actually cared about these issues, or if, at least, there was a militant pro-free expression movement. But both of these developments are highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Latvian website journalist jailed

I am reposting this item, apparently written by Reporters without Frontiers (or Borders) in Latvia. I was out of town when this happened on December 15 and I had assumed www.kompromat.lv to be a Russian-language website, which I don't read because I don't speak Russian. This is not to say that repression against Russian-language media in Latvia should get the short shrift, just that I cannot examine the issues as precisely as if the reasons (or excuses) for the repression were in a language I read. So here it is.
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Reporters Without Borders strongly condemns yesterday’s arrest of Leonīds Jākobsons, a news website owner and editor who for the past month has been posting copies of a series of compromising emails that had been sent or received by Nils Ušakovs, mayor of Riga and a former member of the Latvian parliament. The organisation demands his immediate release.

The emails that Jākobsons began posting on his website Kompromat (www.kompromat.lv) on 17 November indicated that Ušakovs provided information to a member of the Russian embassy in Riga and engaged in a strange correspondence that has aroused suspicions about the nature of Ušakovs’ activities.

The winner of the National Journalism Prize in 2009 in the “Defence of Media Freedom” category, Jākobsons is reportedly also in the possession of other – so far unpublished – emails suggesting that illegal commissions were used to finance a political party’s election campaign illegally.

“We demand Jākobsons’ immediate release,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It is unacceptable that a journalist can be jailed for an alleged media offence in a European Union member country. “The confidentiality of journalists’ sources is being seriously threatened by the seizure of all of his computer equipment and by the pressure being put on him to reveal how he obtained the emails.

“The mayor of Riga can bring a legal action against Jākobsons if he thinks it is necessary, or he can take advantage of the right of reply if he thinks he has been defamed. But Jākobsons’ arrest and imprisonment and the confiscation of all of his equipment seem more like an act of revenge than the actions of an impartial judicial system.”

During a raid on Jākobsons’ apartment yesterday, police seized two computers and all the computer storage material and devices they could find. After completing their search, they arrested Jākobsons on suspicion of illegally acquiring electronic communication data. The police also went to the premises of an Internet Service provider and seized the three servers that hosted the Kompromat website, which can no longer be accessed.

The day after Jākobsons posted the first emails on Kompromat, the site began being the target of a major DDoS attack that lasted several days. On 21 November, a hacker succeeded in deleting all of the site’s archives (more than 10 years of content in Russian and Latvian). The site’s editors were able to restore all the content from a backup but the attacks continued.

The police had refused to accede to a request by Jakobsons for an investigation into the origin of the cyber-attacks on his site.

A well-known and widely-read site, Kompromat has done a lot of investigative coverage of corruption, organized crime, drug trafficking and other criminal activity. It has often been pressured and prosecuted, but none of its personnel had ever been attacked or arrested in the past.

Currently held at Čiekurkalns police station in Riga, Jākobsons is expected to be transferred to the city’s main prison shortly. Conditions in the jail are poor and Reporters Without Borders has been told he will probably have to share a cell with ordinary offenders.

Latvian police deliberately detain, intimidate peaceful protestors

Three persons spontaneously protesting against the actions of a political party and three bystanders were detained by Latvian police in the capital Riga on October 5 and taken to a police station for "identification". There they had a sign written on a sheet and a t-shirt with a slogan on it confiscated. According to media reports, the police gave no reason for confiscating the items, one of which was a sheet with a slogan labeling former Latvian president Valdis Zatlers "a traitor" and the t-shirt with a handwritten slogan "Zatlers, have you no shame?" in Latvian.

So-called administrative charges have been filed against all six persons detained in connection with the protest and they face jail term of up to 15 days and fines of up to LVL 25 (around USD 50).

Following their release, the protestors told Latvian media they would probably not hold a spontaneous protest again, since some of them have small children and cannot risk being detained by police.
The protestors had gathered answering a call on Facebook and social networks to protest plans by the former president's recently founded political party, the Zatlers' Reform Party (ZRP) to form a coalition government with the Harmony Center party, seen by the protestors as pro-Russian and a potential threat to Latvia's national identity and independence. The ZRP was founded earlier this summer after Zatlers, then still president, set in motion a dismissal of Latvia's parliament, the Saeima, which was overwhelming approved by referendum in July. In subsequent elections on September 17, the ZRP came in second to the Harmony Center with 22 seats in the 100-seat Saeima and almost immediately made overtures to bring Harmony Center, with 31 seats, into government.
The party, supported mainly by Latvia's ethnic Russian voters, is seen as "pro-Russian" by many and has been accused of denying that Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 until independence was regained in 1991. For many Latvians, this interpretation of historical events is the local equivalent of "holocaust denial", and led to impassioned comments on internet portals once it became clear that the ZRP wants to include Harmony Center (Latvian abbreviation SC) in the new government almost at any cost.
While the protestors had not applied to demonstrate under Latvian law and local ordinances, they maintain they were not creating a disturbance or blocking traffic. Police have earlier stood aside when spontaneous protests have occured, including another gathering near the Saeima building to protest the ZRPs policies, which saw up to 20 people standing in a street in front of the Saeima. Police also did not intervene when several dozen protestors gathered in front of Latvia's "Government House", the Cabinet of Ministers building, last year to spontaneously protest the arrest of an internet activist who had obtained confidential data on government and municipal salaries in the wake of austerity policies. Those protestors used water-soluble chalk to write slogans on the sidewalk by the government building, actions which could technically be seen as petty vandalism.
The use of temporary detention against anyone protesting on the street clearly creates what under US legal precedent would be seen as a "chilling effect" on the right to protest and on free expression.
The behavior of the police is an outrage, no less than that of the New York Police Department in arresting hundreds of demonstrators in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations (so the US is no longer – and perhaps never really was – the benchmark for free expression and assembly). However, the US and European countries do set examples for public outrage and resistance to such attacks on free speech by the police, both by challenging such actions in the courts and by organizing and publicizing police abuse of free expression rights.

Police in most countries can use their discretion when there are technical violations of the law an/or municipal ordinances that cause no harm to third parties. By choosing to detain three demonstrators and three bystanders, the Latvian police must be presumed to have chosen to intimidate citizens who spontaneously choose to express a political viewpoint in public. This is a first small step toward authoritarianism.

Look "provocative", go to jail

The news agency LETA reports that police in Riga detained several youths who "looked provocative" were loud and behaved "defiantly". So now this is a reason for police action? The chilling effect of the authoritarian Godmanis regime's "another Latvia" has now started.  The arrests took place in the Riga Old Town (Vecrīga), the site of riots on January 13, and the site of loud, provocatively dressed, sometimes "defiant" youths on almost all other dates in the calendar.

I don't know what these people were up to when they were arrested for being young, strangely dressed and "defiant" by the judgement of some police officer, but I would think their respect for the police has dropped and their readiness to maybe throw a paving stone back at those who detained them has increased.