GUEST POST: An assault on people’s right to know

manueldelia.com has been on line for a few days shy of a year. It started out as a hobby but all that changed on the 16 October of last year. Speaking truth to power could no longer be a thing on the side. It became a duty to my family and friends and to my compatriots, even those whose first instinct is to think I should shut up. I am sure it is the same sense of duty that brought about this on line publication you are reading this piece on.

You are reading my article here because manueldelia.com is undergoing a major, coordinated cyber-attack. The storm has been raging for most of this week and every effort of the technical team to counter the attack is met by a vicious onslaught on some other vulnerability of the website.

The great bulk of the attack comes from Ukraine though computers from all over the globe are being used to complement those waves. The website’s engineers say it is a well-funded, professional attack on a scale rarely known to be used on other websites in Malta.

Several Maltese news-sites who carry criticism of the government suffer from many forms of intimidation: coordinated trolling and hate campaigns, direct intimidation of authors and cyber-attacks of varying degrees of power. The one manueldelia.com is under right now just happens to be larger than most.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that cyber-attacks are fair game. No one bleeds when they are a victim of one. These are crimes with a single mindless intent, no different and no less harrowing than the arson at the Times of Malta building forty years ago, without the risk of physical harm.

We now know though that people who want to stop journalists in Malta have, when they wanted to, not stopped short of causing physical harm – even death – to a journalist.

Many people make the mistake of thinking this is an assault on the right of journalists to speak their mind. It is that. But it is more importantly an assault on people’s right to know.

Cyber-attacks like these are designed in such a way as to exclude the possibility of any evidence to point conclusively to a perpetrator. The people who do this are professional hired hands who work for payment for clients who want journalists silenced.

What you must ask yourself, if you’ve ever been to manueldelia.com, is who might be laughing today because you cannot read it.

Your own government is fighting a war against you and your right to know what they are doing.

You must fight back.

One way or another manueldelia.com will be back up and one way or another they will find a way of knocking it back down. And they will try to knock down The Shift News and whoever else calls them out for their crimes.

We are not here for entertainment. We are here to help ensure that as this country is taken over by a crime syndicate, you are at least informed it is and maybe you get a glimpse of how they are doing it.

Support us. Use your own Facebook and Twitter accounts to spread what we write. Help explain why this is important to your friends and encourage them to subscribe. Do not miss any opportunity to defy the government and protest in defence of your right to know. Contribute funding to journalism that only exists because people like you pay for its costs.

They can take us down one at a time. But if we stand together your government can be reminded that they belong to you, that your right to know far outranks their desire to cover up their crimes.

Insist that Truth must be told. It will be.