Investigations as a tool to reform politics
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re:publica 201258 / 72
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00:00
Goodness of fitDistanceReflection (mathematics)Social classLecture/Conference
00:48
CASE <Informatik>Self-organizationAnalytic setSpacetimeMultiplication signLecture/Conference
02:03
Metric systemMathematicsMultiplication signState of matterCategory of beingMoment (mathematics)Shared memorySoftwareMeeting/Interview
02:53
Game controllerShared memorySoftware frameworkDecision theoryState of matterSoftwareContext awarenessPower (physics)PlanningLecture/Conference
03:45
InformationOpen setPower (physics)BitReading (process)Game theoryTracing (software)TrailMetric systemSoftwareSystem administratorMeeting/Interview
04:29
Design by contractState of matterDecision theoryDivisorSystem administratorControl flowTrailSet (mathematics)Category of beingProcess (computing)Covering spaceLecture/Conference
05:47
Channel capacitySoftwareState of matterPower (physics)Group actionMathematicsLecture/Conference
06:23
Video gameSound effectSelf-organizationSoftware frameworkParameter (computer programming)SoftwareEqualiser (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Category of beingState of matterReal numberLecture/Conference
07:51
State of matterStandard deviationPressureDesign by contractAbstractionMereologyTraffic reportingDependent and independent variablesView (database)Service (economics)Self-organizationInformationPower (physics)CASE <Informatik>Open setMathematicsTouch typingProof theoryLecture/Conference
10:26
PrototypeDesign by contractState of matterStandard deviationXML
11:09
InformationWave packetState of matterWebsiteHypermediaOpen setOffice suiteLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
11:44
MathematicsHypermediaInformationOnline helpRight angleTraffic reportingDependent and independent variablesComputer animation
12:13
Dependent and independent variablesPressureMathematical analysisParameter (computer programming)State of matterTraffic reportingCASE <Informatik>Lecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
12:58
CASE <Informatik>PressureDesign by contractStandard deviationSoftwareLecture/Conference
13:31
Design by contractOpen set10 (number)Operator (mathematics)HypermediaPressureMathematicsMeeting/Interview
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Design by contractState of matterWebsiteSoftware developerLevel (video gaming)Lecture/Conference
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Power (physics)CASE <Informatik>MathematicsElement (mathematics)Open setXMLUML
15:37
CircleOpen setProcess (computing)Lecture/Conference
16:29
Mechanism designPlastikkarte
17:11
Programming paradigmOpen setNumberMechanism designAuthorizationDesign by contractShift operatorHypermediaCheat <Computerspiel>Lecture/Conference
18:09
Web pageInformationPower (physics)Computer animation
18:47
Goodness of fitMechanism designCASE <Informatik>Self-organizationInformationMultiplication signSoftwareOpen setOrder (biology)Cartesian coordinate systemInternetworkingSoftware developerMeeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
19:56
ResultantInternetworkingCartesian coordinate systemMeasurementState of matterProgram flowchart
20:22
Cartesian coordinate systemPosition operatorOrder (biology)Office suiteInformationKnowledge representation and reasoningCASE <Informatik>Electronic mailing listState of matterComputer animation
21:44
MereologyElectronic mailing listStandard deviationCondition numberInformationComputer fileSource codeComputer animationXMLProgram flowchart
22:15
Cartesian coordinate systemInformationWhiteboardState of matterArithmetic meanLecture/Conference
22:45
CASE <Informatik>InformationWebsiteMultiplication signMeeting/Interview
23:15
Disk read-and-write headAssociative propertyCartesian coordinate systemComputer animation
24:24
State of matterInformationCASE <Informatik>Stress (mechanics)Set (mathematics)HypermediaProjective planeSource codeXMLProgram flowchartMeeting/Interview
24:55
Set (mathematics)Projective planeInformationMultiplication signMeeting/Interview
25:41
Prime idealDeclarative programmingMereologyProjective planeCategory of beingInformationPressureDisk read-and-write headOpen setLecture/Conference
26:55
DemosceneInformationTraffic reportingDesign by contractSpacetimeOpen sourceComputing platformMultiplication signTrailForcing (mathematics)Cartesian coordinate systemMereologySelf-organizationLecture/Conference
29:17
File formatWebsiteSelectivity (electronic)Design by contractState of matterThresholding (image processing)Functional (mathematics)BitElectronic mailing listVirtual machineMeeting/Interview
30:11
Set (mathematics)InformationOpen setFairness <Informatik>Projective planeIncidence algebraBitOffice suiteHypermediaState of matterOnline helpSystem administratorOpen sourceArithmetic progressionInformation securitySelf-organizationSolid geometryPosition operatorWeb pagePhysical systemProduct (business)Right angleStudent's t-testResultantRevision controlInformation technology consultingLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:17
Thank you very much, Sandra. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Susana, and
00:23
I'm a former journalist myself who got very frustrated 10 years ago from jumping from one story to another. Plus, I live in a country where bad things are happening. So you find it really, really hard to adhere to this basic journalistic principle not to get involved and remain
00:43
at a certain distance, because journalism is about reflection. So I decided to found a watchdog organization that used journalistic skills, journalistic analytical investigations, and started to hunt the bad guys.
01:00
We disclosed concrete cases about their misbehavior, about how they misspent public resources, how they were corrupt or involved in illicit practices, and we use these concrete examples to drive a public debate to reform politics, to diminish space for corruption, and to just make society better as
01:24
we hoped we would achieve it. As Mr. Kennedy, I've been also a Berliner. Not that I would like to see myself as a piece of pastry, but as
01:40
charming mistake, I also come from a country, which is Slovakia, where in 1989 the walls started to crumble and eventually fell down. It was a time where where enthusiasm flourished, people celebrated their newly gained freedoms, they celebrated that they could freely vote and elect their own politicians, and they were full of hopes for a better country.
02:08
While people were celebrating, there were very powerful networks being formed in the background who saw this change, especially as a way to gain profit, as a way to
02:25
see possibilities and opportunities that normal citizens couldn't see at the time. They were able to look up front and they were able to anticipate what would be coming. A large privatization, a large amount of state property that were held by the communist state up till that moment,
02:46
and they all wanted a piece of, or a share of this wealth and property. So they formed very powerful networks, which gave them incredible advantage. They had control over public institutions, they had control over judiciary,
03:05
they had very close ties to politics, which came with resources, it came with money, and it came with the power to form legislative frameworks and to take decisions in the name of the state.
03:22
On the other hand, citizens, they didn't even know what was happening. When all these privatization deals were being set up, where all the plans were being formed about how to use gaps in the legislation, how to use context to politics to gain wealth,
03:41
the citizens were not prepared to be equal partners in the debate. How can you be an equal partner in a debate when you don't even know what is happening? So information and open government in my eyes was really a game changer in a country that I come from. Because it balances power
04:02
from the networks, from the powerful networks, a little bit on the side of the citizens. When you know what is going on, when you can read documents from public administration, you can see traces and tracks of deals, you can see traces and tracks of relationships, and you can
04:23
start being a partner in this debate who is much more powerful. The very charming thing about watching the state or working with the state is that public administration is all about bureaucracy. It's so bureaucratized that there are written rules for everything. So public administration really leaves tracks,
04:48
leaves written tracks in documents because you have very detailed rules, set of rules and legislation for processes like public procurement, privatization,
05:01
signing a contract with the state, prosecuting somebody, etc, etc. All these decisions have to follow certain written rules, but also have to be written down and stamped. So by studying these documents, you can really discover a lot of stories behind, a lot of human stories with
05:21
great impact. Corruption, nepotism or clientelism are usually phenomena that also come with rule breaking. It is really hard when you want to give an advantage to a certain person who should win a tender or who should privatize a property not to do it without damaging other
05:44
competitors or not to do it without breaking certain rules. So these are all factors that come in handy for citizens as me who are really trying to watch the state. But the most important, the most important challenge for us is really this power as an advantage to certain
06:04
networks and certain groups. So how do we change it? How can we change it as citizens who don't have that money, who don't have those resources and who often don't have these capacities and don't have institutions, public institutions that are actually working for them,
06:22
but often in countries like Slovakia, the public institutions actually work for these powerful networks. What we discovered as an organization is that it is really, really hard to change politics with giving it good arguments about why the legislation should be better, why the
06:41
politics should be more transparent and open, why politicians should be held accountable. When you produce research, when you produce good arguments, it is usually very hard to convince politicians because they have a certain advantage that they don't want to give up. They just don't want equality for everyone
07:02
because suddenly they lose this advantage of getting tenders for themselves, getting privatized property for themselves, influencing judiciary or influencing state institutions. So how do we do that? We have to figure out a way how to change the reality for the players, how to make them feel damage.
07:26
Because only if they feel damage, if they lose in a certain way in real life, if they feel the effects of their wrongdoings, then they start to change their behavior and they
07:43
will be much more respectful to the frameworks and to the legislation. And I will show you concrete cases where we succeeded to do so in Slovakia. The second thing we found out is that it's always very important to exert pressure.
08:01
Without pressure, politicians are not listening and they don't feel a need to propose solutions. So what I really believe is the power of examples, of concrete cases that make or that change talk about corruption from something abstract, something that doesn't touch our daily lives,
08:27
to something very tangible, very concrete. So this is my first story. In 2007, there was a notice board on the first floor of our Ministry of Construction and Development
08:41
which carried an announcement about a huge tender. This tender was 110 million euro big. It was a nine-year contract that was supposed to bring contractors this huge piece of business. The announcement was published behind closed doors and
09:02
not surprisingly, it was awarded to people who were very, very close to one political leader. These people started to fill the contract. They started to get the first money from supposed services that they delivered to the state and nobody knew about it. For a year and a half, nobody
09:21
knew what was going on. Then journalists published information that this contract was awarded to people closer to a political leader. Then it was published only on a notice board within a ministry, so no other competitors on the market knew about such an example.
09:43
But nothing happened. This report brought no political response, no public response, no pressure whatsoever. So we as an organization decided that it would be very good to look closer into this tender and we used freedom of expression in our country and
10:01
open data and started to request all the information connected to this tender that we could think of. So we requested contracts from the tender, we requested invoices, we requested proof of delivery, we requested all kinds of other documents that were possible and we decided to publish them online.
10:24
What you can see here is a piece of story, a new story, that was reported about these scandals and on the left side you can see four prototypes of logos that were developed under the contract of this tender. These logos were
10:41
33,000 euros each and they were supposed to be produced during 2,188 hours. These companies reported that they were working on these logos. This was only one example of a
11:01
scandalous money that was requested under this tender from the state by the winning bidders. And other examples came with very overpriced commercials in media, trainings that were never delivered or trainings that were attended only by one or two
11:21
state officers, etc. We produced our own findings. The detailed information was also published online as you can see on our website. When you go down, you can read through all invoices and you can open
11:44
anything that interests you. All this information brought a very big change. Suddenly, from the all quietness, all the media started to go through these invoices with our help and they started to report daily on the scandal. So politicians suddenly
12:06
couldn't look to the right or left without having to react to this tender and having to respond to questions of journalists, very concrete questions about logos, about commercials, etc.
12:22
So the pressure in the society was slowly building. The tender became a way to talk during the television talk shows. It was made fun of by commentators. It was made fun of by famous people on television. So very soon the whole country knew that something was going on and the politicians had to really respond.
12:44
Thanks to the thorough analysis of these cases, we also had enough arguments to go to the EU commissioner responsible for EU funding in member states and we could also go to Olaf and present them with a very detailed report on what went wrong.
13:04
Olaf picked up the case and started their own investigation. European Union exerted another pressure on Slovak political elite and very soon the minister had to resign. The contract was cancelled and European Union refused to cover the money from this tender under EU funding.
13:23
So there was a very concrete damage that suddenly this powerful political network felt. They were prepared for getting a nine-year contract of 110 million euro to perform such a huge contract. You have to organize really well. You have to set up offshore companies around the world who would help you to wash the money.
13:45
You have to involve tens and hundreds of people into the operation and suddenly it's gone. Suddenly the business is gone. So they felt the damage. What also this scandal helped was that it empowered citizens and media with concrete
14:02
open data examples that helped them to set the agenda and to exert pressure on politicians. And because the politicians knew that it wasn't enough only to cancel this concrete tender, they had to come up with solution and proposals. So what they did is that corruption became one of the main agendas for the next coming elections,
14:24
parliamentary elections, and the new government who came out of these elections had to also propose some systemic changes into the country. And one of those were that all the contracts closed between private sector and the state will be published from the beginning of 2011. And we really do have a governmental
14:44
website that publishes every single contract that is signed by the state and private sector. So we will not again find ourselves in such a situation that we will not know of a powerful contract in the background, but we can monitor these contracts when they are being signed
15:03
and when it's in the early stage of development. You can ask afterwards, okay? So this was an example where such a concrete case produced a very big change in our society
15:23
and gave power to citizens. But sometimes open data doesn't really carry concrete elements of corruption. It will not provide you with a concrete evidence of who took a certain amount of money from whom and how it was washed through circles of offshore havens and et cetera.
15:46
But open data is to corruption in my eyes what accounting was to Al Capone. It doesn't produce enough evidence to put somebody to jail, but it often produces enough evidence to see that something is really, really wrong and get the debate going.
16:04
So sometimes it's really about realization that your ambitions can't be too high and the society can't be changed overnight, that it's a longer process. And what is really important is to start to get the debate going on in a country. So I will show you another example when we started to analyze another tender for cleaning
16:27
the roads in Slovakia and washing the snow. We started to look into different counties and see what companies in these counties proposed. What you see here is two pieces of paper that two companies submitted for two different tenders. Both of these bidders were proposing
16:47
that they will clean the snow from the roads on two different places, and these pieces of paper were supposed to confirm that they really own or that they really rented a mechanism, cars, that will allow them to clean the roads. But when we looked closer
17:06
and you see the details, this is a detail from the first paper and the detail from the second paper, we found out that the two companies are actually putting the same numbers of car plates. So one company in a city A was saying that it will be cleaning
17:23
the roads with the same mechanisms as the company B in a completely different city. So this is how they tricked and cheated into the tender. So this piece of evidence wasn't carrying tracks of corruption, but it was enough for us to report this to get attention of the
17:46
authorities. So this is an example where open data can really empower you to set the agenda, not to get somebody to jail, but at least you save public resources by having a certain contract cancelled. Open government was, as I said, a huge shift of paradigm
18:09
in our societies. It happened in legislation, but it didn't happen in the minds of people. So for example, this is an example where we requested information from a register of
18:26
visitors at the Ministry of Education. We wanted to see who is coming to the Ministry and who is visiting ministers, and this was the official answer. We got a photocopy of the front page and the back page of the book, and nothing else. So this shows you that open data is a threat to
18:43
power. They really try to avoid giving you information that is very sensitive. So that's why it's very important to live in a country where you have free judiciary, where you have good appeal mechanisms, and it sometimes really takes years and years to get to the information,
19:01
but then you win. And as it was proven in our organisation, it feels good after five years to have a headline in the newspaper saying that you won a Supreme Court case against the general prosecution or against the Ministry of Finance and et cetera. And what it helps you with is that next time the Ministry of Finance or the general prosecution will not rely on not
19:25
getting you the information because they know that you will come around the corner and you will give it back to them. So when working with very well-established networks who are
19:41
powerful, it is important to be clever and to save our own time and resources. That's why we started to develop open data tools that would serve us but also journalists and others. What you can see here is our application, an internet application that meshes up data from
20:01
official register of businesses in Slovakia and register of public tenders. So you can put in any name of a person, Slovak or whoever else, and the application will check you how many tenders did companies with activity of such a person won in the Slovak state. And I can
20:21
see you a result of a very powerful oligarch in Slovakia who is known to sponsor one political party. And it is not surprising to find out that his companies received a public tenders worth of 266 million euros without value added tax. What you can see thanks to the application as well
20:44
is a concrete position of this person within the companies. So you can see if he was a statutory organ, if he was a director or whatever else. It will also allow you to see which concrete institutions in the state donated these companies where he won the tenders. And one of
21:09
the information that is very interesting, and you can see it here, is that one of his biggest tenders was within an office of the parliament to reconstruct the national heritage castle.
21:22
And what is more interesting about it is to know when this tender happens. And it was under the government and under the direct leadership of a representative from this political party that the oligarch is known to sponsor. When you are a journalist and you want to dig in
21:42
these cases a little further, you can go through a very total list of these tenders, and you can open each and every one of them and check for conditions of the tender, check for what other bidders were part of this tender, check for the contract, and see for yourself.
22:04
Another tool that we started to build preventively is that we started to file freedom of information requests with very basic questions. We want to see who is getting donations from the state, who is winning tenders in the state, who is getting
22:24
European Union funding, or all kinds of other public support. We also want to know who sponsors politics, who advises politicians, who is in the chairmanship of companies, who is on boards that decide about subsidies, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an application that collects
22:45
all this information already for more than 10 years. So when you are a journalist and you want to work on a corrupt case, you don't have to file your own freedom of information requests from Ministry of Finance to the Parliament to government and wait and wait and wait and see
23:04
a situation when the government or the Parliament doesn't give you the information, so you have to appeal, you have to go to court, you have to wait for years, but you can click on this website and you can save yourself time. And I can show you one example of, this will ring a bell to you,
23:23
company Siemens, and we can see what is in our application about Siemens. So what you can find here is all the public tenders that Siemens received in Slovakia over the last 10 years, you can go in the chart, you can see civic associations that carry Siemens
23:45
names, you can see that people who were advising to politics were connected in some way to Siemens, you can see that a basketball club with the name of Siemens is receiving two percent of tax from Slovakia, that it also donates money to Slovak institutions, to Slovak ministries,
24:07
especially Ministry of Interior. You can also see that it had debts in a custom duty and you can also see that it receives European Union funding for education of their own employees.
24:23
So when you are an investigative journalist, you just saved a couple of months of work receiving this information from the state, and you can proceed and work on your case on your own. So what I would like to stress is that when you do this kind of work, use the media,
24:45
get attention, set agenda, but also be patient, and don't try to bluntly copy projects from other settings that might not work in your country. Always listen to your own needs, to your own goals, and get inspiration from others. It helped us many times, but first see
25:06
if the settings in your country wouldn't be actually working against such a project. So don't replicate blindly, and sometimes it is important, especially in countries like Slovakia,
25:23
to be creative. When you want a certain information from government that you believe it should be there and it's not, you need to find creative ways how to get it when politicians refuse to give it to you. And one of such examples is a project.
25:43
We believed that asset declarations of high politicians as the president, ministers, members of parliament should be available online, but we were really frustrated with getting to convince the parliament to pass a legislation that would allow us to gather this information, and we didn't get it.
26:01
We decided to form our own project, it's called Open Politics, and it contains voluntary asset declarations of politicians, very detailed ones. So they declare what property they have, what depths they have, where do they travel, who do they meet, and they do it just because
26:20
they want to, and just because we exerted enough pressure through the media and through the citizens to request such information. After a couple of years of this project, where it was really small and unwanted at the start, last year we had a prime minister of Slovakia voluntarily being part of the project, we had the speaker of the parliament, we had half of our government,
26:43
and a lot of members of parliament. And what was really interesting to see is that one of the MPs even asked us if he should include a property that he doesn't own officially, not on paper. He owns it behind the scenes through a secret agreement with a different person. And we said,
27:03
of course, you have to put it there. You want to be open and transparent. And then I wondered why he asked us. And what I found out is that once they put information up there and they distinguish themselves from others as being transparent and fair, they really fear that the competition would just tell on them that they are not so transparent and they are not
27:24
good guys. So he was actually taking a preventive step from being blamed. Thank you very much. So I was told that we have space for questions.
27:43
So thank you, Susanna, and I'll give you... Hi, my name is Nico, and maybe I missed it at the beginning, but how do you get the first information about the contract which was only available inside the ministry? So did you have some kind of whistleblowing or something like that?
28:04
Yes, it was not part of the work of our organisation, but the first initial information came to a journalist through a whistleblower, through a secret source. So sometimes it is true that you can't avoid using sources. But what I really wanted to highlight is that
28:22
that open data can liberate you from sources. Many times you find really interesting tracks in the open data itself, so when you are desperate as a journalist, you don't have to turn to sources, but you can really browse through these registers and through the applications. But it's true that this concrete initial information came from a source.
28:45
But what was interesting and I tried to mention as well is that when the first report came out, really nothing happened. So it was a huge case, but for the first month and a half, nothing really happened with it. Any other questions, comments?
29:09
You mentioned that all contracts are transparent on your platform. Are all invoices of the government also transparent? Yes, well, there is an official governmental site that has all the contracts and invoices.
29:25
Well, there was quite a resistance, especially from municipalities in Slovakia who claimed that publishing all the invoices would be too costly for them. So the state had to come with a compromise, and it said that to a certain threshold, I think it's 3,000 euros,
29:42
you can only publish a list of invoices and contracts, but above that you have to also put in a scan or a machine or a document in a machine readable format. So there is a governmental side, but we also produce together with Transparency International Slovakia, our own side that adds up to the functionality and allows us to
30:04
work with the data a little bit more. Hi, Susanna. I wanted to ask you because I know in Czech Republic the corruption is really widespread. Do you have a sister agency or fair play Czech Republic?
30:26
Would you work together because the problems are obviously similar in lots of the routes? Yes, we were one country, right? So the problems are similar. Well, we don't, but we work with a lot of organizations also in Czech Republic, and we were asked sometimes to
30:43
also spread to Czech Republic, but you have a great organization, Orzivieni in Prague, which is doing good work. I must say that we are a little bit luckier than you. I was on the jury of a journalistic award in Prague this year, and I found out that,
31:01
for example, when your media requested certain amount of information from the state, they had to pay a lot of money because the state said that it would cost hours and hours of work of their officers. So they charged, I think, 1,000 euros for information about how much money gets certain highly positioned officials within state administration paid,
31:24
which could never happen in Slovakia. So in a sense, we are lucky because we have a very progressive Freedom of Information Act that allows us to get information basically free of charge.
31:41
So thanks a lot. Any other questions? Yes. Well, thanks. It's a great project. Did they ever turn up to you physically? What do you do then? Do you have security protection?
32:01
I must say that I feel also lucky living in Slovakia. We are told to be this peaceful nation who doesn't lead wars. So I must say that I don't know how courageous we would be in settings as Russia or really harsh countries, and I really admire everybody who is doing this kind of work there. So we have a lot of verbal harassment from governments.
32:26
So when we produce our results, we are usually attacked on press conferences, and they try to say that we are spies coming from foreign countries being financed by Jewish money of George Soros and these kind of powerful people.
32:44
So the government is usually trying to attack us verbally. We had a couple of incidents where the office was robbed in a very strange way, or we had an incident where we locked the door in the night, and when we come back in the morning, it was unlocked. It was closed but
33:02
unlocked, so it was clear that somebody was inside. So these kind of things happen, but nothing really life-threatening, and I hope it will stay that way. Yes, we are funded by Open Society Foundation, which is established by George Soros to a big deal with the institutional
33:23
grants. We also receive help from Slovak citizens through two percent of tax, which for example last year brought 70,000 euros, which is quite a lot. We also get funding from Slovak companies, especially smaller. We also offer our own consultation and training and get paid for it.
33:46
We get little sources from Slovak foundations, domestic sources, but also other international foundations. But it's always open grant competitions. So you submit your grant in an open competition that is actually published to everybody else, and you get it or you don't.