In March, following a terror attack in London, The Age came out with the incredible claim that WhatsApp had something to do with it. This time, The Age, whose parent company Fairfax Media boasts that it practises quality journalism, has got a new theory: the instant messaging app Telegram had something to with it.
In an article titled "Telegram: The secret 'app of choice" for terrorists", the newspaper claimed that "Australian authorities are struggling to crack the highly secretive 'app of choice' for terror plotters worldwide, partly stifled by the app creators' refusals to push back on jihadi infiltration".
The level of hyperbole in that one paragraph is difficult to beat. Terror plotters worldwide? Hardly, as The Age could only cite anecdotal evidence of extremists using Telegram in four cities.
Of course, to the ignorant, one app is as good as another. Further down the story, WhatsApp, described as "a similarly encrypted app", was cited as being used by a group that shot a police employee in Sydney.
{loadposition sam08}One rarely expects educated statements on terror attacks by politicians who take every opportunity to hype up things and increase the atmosphere of fear so that they can control things to their liking.
Journalists, however, are expected to add to people's understanding of situations and not rush to stupid judgements. But The Age seems to have encryption on the brain just as much as does British Prime Minister Theresa May or her Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull.
And if that wasn't bad enough, The Age took recourse to quoting from the Middle East Media Research Institute, an organisation which has, on numerous occasions, been found to have mistranslated things in order to skew facts its own way.
This organisation claimed that "Increasingly, attacks had been virtually directed by overseas jihadists who provided minute-by-minute directions to recruits via Telegram". This was reported without so much as a blink despite the fact that there was no evidence provided to back up this rather sensational claim.
The encryption debate rears its head every time there is an attack. Politicians would love a backdoor into each and every secure app, so they can snoop on the public as and when they want.
A writer with a shade more of a clue, Cory Doctorow, put it this way: "What Theresa May thinks she's saying is, 'We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce backdoors into their tools for us'. There are enormous problems with this: there's no backdoor that only lets good guys go through it."
The writer of The Age article forgot one thing: there are numerous other apps that offer end-to-end encryption: Signal, G-Data Secure Chat, Ceerus, and Pryvate to name a few.
Perhaps The Age should start campaigning for all these apps to be banned. Else, the number of terror attacks may well spiral out of control.