The Panama News is and has been since the Martinelli administration under heavy electronic attack. On a day after the high court has confirmed the prison sentences of Martinelli’s bag man and national security director for illegally acquiring electronic hacking equipment and programs that have never been recovered, the editor wonders — but lacks proof.
Among the reasons why The Panama News
is so much a social media publication…
by Eric Jackson
Uh huh. The Martinelli gang got the Pegasus electronic spy system from the Israeli company NOS, and though courts were prevailed upon to rule that Don Ricky knew nothing about it, two of his top guys are going to prison about it. That gear, said to have been last seen in one of Martinelli’s business offices, has never been recovered.
Then, post-Martinelli, WhatsApp messages to and from his successor, Juan Carlos Varela, were intercepted and published. There has been a big international scandal about NSO having a hand in THAT sort of thing, too. It is also said that the messages of the American Embassy here were intercepted, but that’s all very hush-hush, national security and all that. (See, these days you don’t have to breach US security, you can just embarrass the US government and you may be accused of being a spy.)
Means, motive, opportunity, previous methods of operation? These things tend to count for nothing in the Panamanian courts. Is it a holdover from the three qualified eyewitnesses rule of Arab Spain’s Islamic Law? More like corruption of more local and recent vintage, I think.
Whatever the editor might suspect, stating those suspicions as fact would surely draw criminal defamation charges.
But the constant electronic attacks on The Panama News websites? Those are a reality. Which leads to more of our publishing via our Facebook, Twitter and Mastodon feeds, which are not as easily shut down. EXCEPT if a communication from the “right” person or agency gets a shadow ban imposed.
We carry on.
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