For the last several weeks, Pique has been the subject of a lawsuit launched May 20 by the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW).
The aim of the lawsuit, according to the municipality’s representations in court, was to protect its staff and their personal information from criminals who lurk on the dark web.
The RMOW’s lawyer argued that Pique’s coverage of the recent cyber attack on the RMOW might “whet their appetite.”
I’m sorry, but that claim makes no sense to me. The information Pique printed was already available to these types of criminals following the cyber attack on the RMOW made public April 28.
Pique’s coverage contained a generalized description of the attack by cyber criminals on the RMOW, a matter we consider to be of public interest and importance to the community.
And consider that the lawsuit was in fact an action being taken to try and control what the Pique would publish before it did so—the municipality did not claim that the newsmagazine had published anything in violation of the law. Instead, the RMOW sought injunctions to prevent the Pique from publishing certain details about the cyber attack in the future.
Indeed in the weeks leading up to the launch of the lawsuit, Pique invested considerable time interviewing, speaking with and cooperating with municipal spokespeople to make sure the stories were factual, accurate, and informative for the community.
Pique staff repeatedly told the RMOW that Pique had no interest in putting anyone in the community at risk in this case.
Many questions remain about the launching of the lawsuit. Who made the decision to launch the lawsuit and why? One has to assume that all of council and the mayor were fully behind this use of taxpayers’ money, but were they? And if the attack was a zero-day exploit found in SonicWall VPN, a service used by the RMOW, did the municipality fix the vulnerability using a patch released in February? Who exactly was responsible for allowing the hack to happen?
The head of the RMOW’s IT department Ted Battiston (general manager of corporate and community services) in his affidavit to the court points to the fact that you need a URL to locate information available on the dark web—and a URL pointing to a location on the Dark Web was put up on the RMOW website by the hackers. That was more of a risk to people’s personal information than anything Pique did.
Pique can fully understand the desire of the RMOW to protect its staff, but what remains incomprehensible to me is the way senior staff endeavoured to do this—through a costly legal action over more than two months, which ultimately culminated in the RMOW walking away from the lawsuit—discontinuing it on July 15.
What a waste of taxpayers’ money—and to add salt in the wound, the RMOW informed Pique that we have to put in a Freedom of Information request to find out how much this all costs Whistler.
This action forced a long-standing community business to defend itself in BC Supreme Court at a time when the whole economy is suffering from the challenges of the pandemic.
From the time the cyber attack became public, Pique investigated the story reaching out to experts, learning about and reporting on the dark web—telling the residents of Whistler the scale of the risks they faced from ransomware criminals—something we felt was missing in the three press releases put out by the RMOW ahead of the lawsuit.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects free speech and freedom of the press. The ability of the press to report on and even criticize government action is a hallmark of a free and democratic society. Yet the RMOW chose to use your tax dollars to try to dictate what your community newspaper could tell you about a matter of public interest that affects us all, just because it happened to involve the RMOW.
In my opinion, that’s not the proper role for our municipal government.
Pique did not acquiesce to the demands of the RMOW—it stood its ground not just for itself, but for all newspapers reporting on government.
