 us to understand a little bit more about the Brazilian context, which is kind of far away from the American public in general. Let's go down and oops. Let me just give you some background about Brazil first. Brazil is a country in South America, as you know, and it's 186 million inhabitants. We have been a full democracy since 1985. We have right now 42.6 million internet users in Brazil that accounts for 46.3% of all South American internet users. We have 100% digital elections for the past 10 years. Elections in Brazil are all digital. We don't have paper ballots anymore in the country. And we have no freedom of information law in Brazil, funny enough. There are some other figures about internet usage in Brazil and in South America. As you can see, the nominal figure for Brazil is very high, 42.6 million people connected to the internet. Much more than in other countries of South America. But only 22.4% of the Brazilian population has access to the internet right now. So although the figure is high, the percentage of the population who has access to the internet is still very low. But on the other hand, Brazil has been having one of the fastest growing rate of people getting connected to the internet. And from the year 2000 to 2007, there was this increase of 752% of the number of people who got connected to the internet in the country. Some more information about e-governance in Brazil. This is a research conducted by Brown University Center for Public Policy. They do that every year. It's called e-government country rankings for e-governance, of course. And to my surprise, Brazil was ranked number 38 in 2006. And now it's been ranked 13th, as you see on that table. And that's maybe because there has been a trend for all governments at all levels in Brazil to be more present on the internet. But the quality of the services which are being delivered to the Brazilian public is pretty much debatable. Although it's, as you can see, this is a very serious research. It's amazing that a third-world country like Brazil is ranking 13th in terms of e-governance. I'm going to talk about you now after this very quick contestralization of Brazil about two cases that I've been involved with. First one is called Políticos do Brasil, which means politicians from Brazil or Brazilian politicians, if it will. And the other one is related to the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism. As Persephone said, we put together this national forum for right of access to public information in Brazil because we don't have this freedom of information law in Brazil. Let's talk first about the Políticos. The Políticos is a website. The project was started back in the year 2000. We have more than 25,000 Brazilian politicians listed in this site covering the three national general elections. That means 1998, 2002, and 2006 general elections in Brazil. Everybody who runs for office in those elections is listed. Or maybe most of them I should say, because of course sometimes you cannot get hold of the information of everybody, but everybody who is somebody is there. It's a free search website. Anybody can do searches and look for information about any politician. And just to give you a flavor of what is this all about, in 2006 when we last updated it, it had an audience on the first day of more than one unique million visitors on that single day in Brazil, which is huge. It's a huge audience, not only for Brazil, but I think for any standards worldwide. So the objective of Políticos was to be, first of all, because it was funded by the newspaper Folia de São Paulo. Based in São Paulo, it was supposed to be and it was actually a source of news stories for the newspaper. So we produced out of the information we put together in this database lots of news stories for the newspaper. But together with that we had some side benefits from this project. For instance, we could check, we journalists and everybody, every citizen in Brazil could, if he or she would be interested in it, check individual records from any individual politician. It was an easy way to get hold of some information about any politician because we don't have, as I said, an easy way to get it through the authorities because we lack a freedom of information law. We had, of course, a particular interest in election files because in Brazil, for the past three or four decades actually, there is this mandatory federal regulation that makes any politician running for public office in the country to file with the election commission in his town or state lots of information including his list of personal assets, his list of patrimony and that's supposed to be a way for them to be hold accountable so that people would know whether they have got more, well, if they got richer during the time they are in office in a way which is not compatible to the salaries they are earning as politicians. But those documents, although they were being filed by politicians in the past decades, they were never made public except for some major figures in Brazil, major politicians. And the whole idea of this database, of this website was to make or to provide all this information to the public in a freely and open way. We have used during this process what we call in journalism computer-assisted reporting because we had been receiving the information in several formats. Most of the times they came in paper so we had to type down the information or scan it and then we had different sorts of files and we have to mash them up all together. So we used extensively car, as we say, computer-assisted reporting. And of course, as I said, the beauty of this thing is making possible for people to compare how a politician would be at the beginning of his term as a congressman or a governor or a local legislative officer and compare that beginning situation with the situation when he is about or she is about to leave office. Let's go ahead. This is the homepage of Politicles do Brasil. It's a very easy database and I'm going to show you how it works, actually. So you have basically three years, the three elections we had, 1998, 2002, 2006. Then you can choose, for instance, like president. Then you go, buscades search. It's only in Portuguese and we don't have an English version for that. Hopefully it works. And then, wow, getting a problem there. Reload it. It's coming. So we got all the politicians who run for president in 2006. Let's choose, for instance, the one who won Lula. Then you get his personal file, all the information about the politician in here. When you click here, you just get instantly all his personal assets in the year of 2006. Then you see he has one, two, three apartments and some savings accounts and all that. But if you want, you can go then and choose from 2002 when he was a candidate again. Then you go and here he is. And let's get rid of that. And this is a different thing because in 2002 we had to scan thousands of documents. So it's a PDF stuff. And then this is actually the form filed by the candidate with the election. This is his signature. And here is his declaration of assets, personal assets. So you see how many apartments he has, how many he has in his savings accounts and all that. And it's all sign it. So we have that for 25,000. We have 25,000 records. And that's basically what the database does and the website offers to anyone interested in it. Let's just go forward here. And here's the example of just giving you his assets. And of course that generated tons of stories, news stories not only for Folha de São Paulo, but because the database and the website is open to anyone in Brazil. And because Folha de São Paulo is a national paper, it will be only interested in national people like president, governors, most known people in the country. We were not interested in local guys, but local newspapers all over Brazil were interested in local guys. So it generated tons of stories around Brazil because it empowered journalists in other states in the countryside to look for information about the politicians of their local constituencies. And that was the first time they had that opportunity. And we think, I think, that was a new mechanism, a new tool to hold politicians a little more accountable in the country. Let's move forward, just being running out of time. This is about the forum for right of access to public information in Brazil. We founded Abraji, the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism in 2002. And the forum was founded in 2003. Abraji, the association. And I must say Abraji was very much formed with IRE on mind. IRE is the investigative reporters and editors in the United States. It's an association which has been around since 1975 in this country. It's been a pioneer in the use of computer-assisted reporting and training journalists in this country. And we kind of have some contacts with them. I wouldn't say we copied their model, but we took what was good for the Brazilian reality and we put Abraji together in Brazil. And Abraji, right after it was built up, decided to launch this new initiative in the country to lobby and put some pressure on the Congress or on the President to have a Freedom of Information Act in Brazil to make things more accessible to everybody, not only to journalists, but also to the Brankin file anywhere in the country interested in public information. This is the word map showing the countries which already have some sort of national Freedom of Information law enacted. And as you can see in South America, most of the countries are still debating the need of a Freedom of Access to public information. Yes, Ethan? Freedominfo.org. I'm going to leave this presentation here if you want. This is a very old map, actually it's 2005, but not much things changed since then. This map is very good for you to think about, to ponder why some countries are still lagging behind in terms of dealing with public information and internet and that kind of stuff. I think it's a very self-explanatory map. When you look at Africa and some parts of Asia, you know the whole story. While the forum's accomplishment so far, we managed to get some 15 congressmen from the Brazilian Congress committed to our effort to push for a Freedom of Information law in Brazil. We just launched this website for the forum because it's a non-profit, we don't have any headquarters, it's pretty much a virtual organization, so we managed to get some money from donations from the different institutions that are members of the forum and we put together this information website talking about the need of a law regulating this right in Brazil and we have been training people to move forward and write requests for public information and I just have to put a caveat here because Brazil doesn't have a law but funny enough we have the right of information, right to have access to public information written in our constitution. There's an article in our constitution saying that everybody has to have access to public information but because that article of our constitution has never been regulated because all the articles in the constitution must have a law regulating how it works or how it works in practice, that has been a rather gray area and some local officers are never certain of the way to deal with those requests so it's very difficult for people for the rank and file down the road to get some public information for journalists it's been a little more efficient that constitution mechanism and it's possible although there is no regulation to push some authorities to give you the information you need so we have been training people on how to do that, let me just show you very quickly this is the website and when you go down here you have a model of a request so anyone can print that and send it to any public government in Brazil any public agency and try to get the public information although it's going to be difficult sometimes you have to sue the local agency to get the information released most newspapers in Brazil or major newspapers have been doing that my newspaper has done that a lot of times and just to go forward this is basically about it thank you very much, I've taken a lot of time and let's go to the Q&A session thank you very much maybe the Politico-Brazil one, sounds like it was a lot of manual labor to go out and find that document and scan it and you had to go all over the country can you talk a little bit about how that worked it was basically very time consuming it took four years for us to basically me to put all that together because the politicians have to file their records with the local election commissions in each one of the 27 Brazilian states when they are deciding to run for office they have a local authority and then they have to go and pull out the papers and that's going to be filed locally so I had to go sometimes in person to several of the Brazilian states and I was fortunate enough to have my paper supporting me in doing that which was amazing in a way because we never know whether that would end up in a good story because I could fail and not get any papers and the maximum I would have would be a story about how Brazil is miserable in terms of right of access to public information which is something everybody knew in Brazil so it took me four years, I started in the year 2000 and then in the year 2002 right before the election the general elections which happens in Brazil so every October of the election year right before that we managed to put that together and that was online it was an instant success we got several awards for that we produced several stories, a series of news stories about inconsistencies in the declarations of certain politicians and so it was great and as you said and as you mentioned the major difficulty until 2002 was the fact that the information filed by the politicians really strange, they were all in paper they were never giving us the information in the digital form so we had basically me and one intern to sort that out all the papers and scan one by one all those thousands of pages and put them together in a readable form and then feed the database that was the major difficulty in 2006 because I would say because we put so much pressure on the Federal Elections Commission in Brazil and they gave us, they started the local commissions within the 27 states they start up to give us the information already in a digital form so that's why when you go to 2002 and 1998 you just have PDFs and when you go to 2006 you have all digitalized in a way, it's all typed so it's pretty more searchable but we could not afford to type all the information from previous years but I think anyway it's very easy if you want to compare one with the other you can do it very easily so just to make a long story short the major difficulty was technical and political because we had to convince the local agencies the local election agencies that we had the right to put our hands on those informations and sometimes we had to go to court and file suit because they were not willing to give us so that's why it took so long but we succeeded in the end, that's it Yes? You know whether this model is being adopted or whether the problem is the same and some other Latin American countries for example, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina Any of them, Nicaragua Well so far as far as I know, it has not been replicated anywhere but you have to bear in mind that it's necessary to have some sort of provision in the country that would make mandatory for politicians to file those informations otherwise you would have to go individually to any politician, to all the politicians to get that information No, I do not know and I know that as far as freedom of information well, freedom of right of access to information Mexico is pretty much ahead of all other Latin American countries so far, they have this law which was enacted in 2002 which is to my regard very effective so far it's something that should be seen in a way as a model for other Latin American countries because it's been working very well in Mexico as far as I know but they don't have anything that would oblige politicians to file that sort of information that's the problem, they have the law which will empower people to have public information but not that type of information So, that's it Yes? I understand that the site includes not only the declaration of assets but also the tax identifier number of each of these politicians including candidates who ran and didn't get elected That's right, yeah very good question Have you not had any privacy challenges on that? Oh yeah, we... You will see here Persephone is asking me about this figure, this number here this is basically what will be here the social security number we published 25,000 social security numbers of politicians in Brazil on our website so that makes it possible for anyone to pick up that number and we actually teach people how to do it and go if you click here this is really something this is another endless source for a news story it says here Saiba Como know how to check the CPF CPF is the social security number of politicians in their fiscal situation so when you click here it's actually a manual on how you should use that number to check whether that guy is paying his or her taxes and people were very angry at us but we decided we should do that and I happened to be based in Brasilia and before I did it I went into this this is being broadcast but I'm not going to say anything improper here I went to the Supreme Court and talked to some judges there's some justices there and asked them whether we could as a newspaper send them a that's possible within the Brasilian judicial system to send them as a newspaper a formal question about whether politicians should have or not that number disclosed in Brazil what will be their understanding of it so before we put this online we send this formal request to the Brazilian Supreme Court and they decided formally that was not a judgment it was just a consultation and they responded to us they gave us a letter saying that politicians because they are in public life there's no impediment whatsoever for a newspaper or a website to publish any information regarding their fiscal situation because we are not disclosing actually the salaries of the politicians we are just disclosing whether they pay or not pay taxes which is something different but the salaries of politicians are public anyway everybody knows because that's a pattern for that there is a pattern for that so yes that was a very very useful tool of the website as well thank you for asking that I was kind of not remembering that thank you yeah had any way of knowing whether this information affected voting patterns or other people who were exposed as having not been honest I don't know yeah good question I don't have any scientific information in that because there is no research focusing on voters turn out or interest of the voters in politics or that kind of stuff but the only objective information I would have to give you about it is the audience of the website which is being enormous and I suppose that because so many people searched through the website more people were having a more conscious decision and at the time they were going to vote in Brazil that's my understanding but I don't have any any specific answer about whether more people were voting or getting involved in politics because of it but my hunch if I have any would be that yes it helped a lot to improve the political standards in Brazil there's a real sort of trend towards these sort of government information sites in the US right now Sunlight Foundation focused on these sorts of things they work for you in the UK one of the things that I find very interesting about this is that you guys did this very much from a journalistic perspective and with the idea being that it was to help your newspaper help other smaller newspapers sort of gain these stories do you think that the audience for this sort of work this sort of public transparency work is the general public is it activists is it journalists who are we building these resources for and who does it make sense to build these resources for very good question I think at the beginning well most of the people who would be interested in it will be journalists because it's as I said an endless source of stories you can I was last week someone was sending me an email from the Rio de Janeiro newspaper to interview me about some details of this and it made the front page the front page headline of this newspaper last week and this is being online for two years now last year updated in 2006 so it's an endless source of stories but because we don't have that many journalists in Brazil we had a million unique visitors on the first day so I suppose it's all types of persons it's all type of people who would be interested in it of course we have a curve of audience the prime time for this is prior to the election it's election year right now it doesn't get much of an audience but I believe during election years it's pretty much everybody it was like so much talked about it was all over the internet all the bloggers were talking about it they were posting notes about it they were comparing this politician from the Amazon region nobody had heard about it he or she were there wow this is new and I think it draws attention from all sorts of publics during the election year and after that after that curve goes down then it becomes something for journalists which is right now what's the biggest story that's broken from it what's the biggest scandal that someone pulled out of it so many well I would say let me just go here and show you it's the increase of patrimony of politicians in Brazil being much higher than the increase of the regular average Brazilian taxpayer and you have all the stories here you can check on that let me just see patrimony assets personal apartment cars boats let's go and see here they are doing very well they attract more good people and then basically I would say the major story was how much in personal assets do Brazilian politicians accumulate it over the years we had that beautiful figure to put on the headline it was like a billion or something and it was increasing at a rate of inflation rate of Brazil it was kind of a I can't recall the exact figure but that was the major impact story in my opinion we had tons of stories about inconsistencies in the documents filed by politicians in the real life they were having in their local towns we had we had several local newspapers doing that just show you one which was very good yeah, sure I'm going to show you right away it was actually a major competitor of Folha de São Paulo a newspaper from O Global from Rio de Janeiro called O Global and they picked up some information from us and they came out with this let me show you this oh no, that's not the one that's it I was planning to show you this right from the beginning but it's okay it's it's here that's really good that's a very good story that's a practical example of what happened and I decided to choose this one because it's not from my newspaper it's from a competitor's newspaper that used our database I was glad with it I'm not that glad but again I thought it was great this politician was a former governor of this unknown state for you guys, Maranhão which is, you know, right northeast region of Brazil so his assets within politicals database were like this in 2002 like half a million reais which is roughly you divide by two so it's roughly $250,000 and in 1998 he had about $400,000 reais and the change from 98 to 2002 was 41% but when he was about to leave office this is official records official assets there you go, it's all signed by him, it's all official the politicians were filing these records very easily and with no concern because no one was going after them so they could lie even it was in print because no one was seeing that and then look at that, he bought this penthouse for three million reais so they discovered that so this is the story and how could he so big scandal you know former governor in jail facing well that was last year, I don't know whether he's still in jail and this is another example here a politician declared just a regular house for very tiny value but see what the reporters found when they went to the address so he said I had this very humble house like 10,000 reais or something and they went there to see it and they took this picture and this is really it's self-explanatory it's a good news story and the million dollar club in Rio that's all our competitors using our database I think that's beautiful and this is like they compare the assets of every politician over the years now it's very feasible to do that very easy so that's the kind of story and this is the one which just came out last week from this other newspaper from Rio de Janeiro about the patrimony or assets, net assets of the political people in Brazil was increasing which is huge that's over a full election cycle four years which is much more inflation in Brazil is around 3-4% a year nowadays and that's good those people are doing good they should be asked to come over here and help George W. Bush to handle the recession here they're really smart people yeah okay the theories behind how to break this cycle of corruption one is the information is not available to the electorate the other part is that the electorate doesn't really care that much in other things other counter examples of people who have had unwarranted gains in their wealth that have gone ahead despite the information being publicly available and been re-elected the office what do you mean exactly people you go on the website you see this person has doubled his wealth while being in office for four years or six years and people go ah whatever we like him and re-elect him is there anecdotal evidence of that has anyone looked at that that's a good question I don't know actually but I think I would say yes I would say people still don't vote for those bastards too it's democracy you know it happens this builds on Rob's question but what's the sort of public perception of corruption I just pulled up the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index and Brazil doesn't rank well it comes in 72nd in the world chimed with India, China, Mexico Morocco some nations that are pretty notoriously corrupt do these stories come out and everyone goes well of course they're all thieves or is there an aspect of shock to this is there a sense that if you guys run 10, 15, 20 stories this is going to change or is this just going to be this is the daily diet of what newspapers do but this is also the way the country runs thank you I liked your question so much because this index put together by Transparency International is so bad I think I have many friends with Transparency International and Transparency Brazil but I think that's that's a misconception of what corruption is all about because in Brazil we have been in a democracy for more than two decades in a row now fortunately very stable a lot rule of law and above all a free media very lively competitive media in Brazil and we have been chasing the bad guys so hard in the past two decades and we have had so many stories about corruption and what's been doing wrongly and putting the government at all levels that one might have the wrong impression that everybody is a thief as you said and the index put together by Transparency International is about impressions that people have it's not that it's only a bad thing but it's just one aspect of life in different countries I think more should be put together I think the standards of Brazilian politicians are as bad as in any other countries but because maybe we have this transparent way of dealing with everything nowadays in Brazil it looks like to some people that there are more corrupt people in Brazil than in other places we don't listen much about Paraguay or whatever because they don't have much of a free media there sometimes so yeah well thank you for asking that I think it's really a misconception that index let me just follow up to that and say that I took part as I am a member of ICIJ as well International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington which is an international network of investigative reporters around the world in 50 countries we are 100 people and we in 2003 started up a project called Global Integrity Index which evolved into a new organization I am not part of it anymore I just took part at the beginning of it it's on the internet just type Google it Global Integrity Index and we decided we should go after measuring corruption in another way rather than transparency international instead of asking people if the country is corrupt we would go and see how the institutions were functioning in different countries and how people would have access to anti-corruption mechanisms in those countries that would be a more precise way to see the state of corruption in different countries and of course because corruption is not a measurable thing it's impossible to measure corruption I'm curious about another aspect of what we see here in political situations which becomes a focus which is conflict of interest involving politicians which may or may not show up and may or may not be relevant in terms of increases in network it's in fact possible that politicians a period of time that on your numbers it might have been 112% a year and that might be reasonable but the stock market went up and it was perfectly okay because they had assets when they started and they grew but what's often a more concern is conflicts of interest where here lobbyists will give special favors or respond or politicians will respond to special interest requests and I wonder in Brazil whether either the sites or material you've shown us or other things try and control or highlight these conflicts of interest between industrial companies whether they're in Brazil or outside of Brazil and Brazilian politicians so conflicts of interest where a construction company says or a defense or an airplane manufacturer says to a politician maybe I'll pay you but maybe I will support your next campaign financially so you can run for president or run for governor or run for senator and in exchange for that I hope you'll give me support when I ask you to support a bill for for tax exemption for tax exemptions or because the government I want you to buy more airplanes that I produce those kinds of things so those kinds of of concrete conflicts of interest well I think we are not as advanced as you are here in this country in tracing those lobby lobbyists and like backstairs interests like the center for public integrity in Washington here the Open Secrets Foundation they will do a great job here we are trying to mimic those experiences in Brazil but we have had no success so far because it's a new initiative in Brazil we are trying to trace out all the funders for politicians but because informal and soft money in Brazil is much more dramatic even than here in this country so it's being a little difficult for us to trace out the lobbyists who is behind every politician in the country but that's certainly something that we will be heading to in the next years because yeah we already have access to that but as I said major companies and major donors would do that in a way which is untraceable we cannot get hold of the information it's not straight into the politicians party it's unofficial and illegal of course so we are still developing other ways to do that because the quality of the public and official data on that in Brazil is very poor yes this is just follow up what Ethan said this is the global integrity index which is a competitor to transparency international it's much smaller because it doesn't include as many countries as transparency international but that includes 290 indicators in each country 290 indicators in each country are put together and then they developed this index which is much more precise for measuring corruption in several countries rather than the one from transparency international in my opinion people who do a lot of work in governance in the development world get very worried about the fact that some of the countries that are doing the best jobs with transforming their governance so Argentina, Brazil, Chile Ghana, Uganda Botswana tend to come up pretty poorly on TI's survey but are clearly moving in the right direction and TI's survey is really weird I mean what you basically do is you grab a bunch of international business people you can do it at Davos and you pull them aside and say hey Rob as an international businessman just how corrupt is Brazil on a scale from one to seven and you give it a three and I give it a four and the rating ends up being 3.5 and it's a perception and these perceptions it turns out can take decades to change but what it's really measuring is the brand of a nation more than anything else I had heard of it I hadn't looked in close detail and what I'm sort of amazed by is looking on this at the moderate rating and the countries that come out in the moderate center Argentina, Benin, Brazil, Bulgaria Ethiopia, Georgia, Ghana, India, Kenya Nigeria, Philippines and Uganda and out of that list the vast majority of them are sort of fairly happy governance stories over the last decade if we admit Kenya because of recent problems, Georgia because of recent problems in Ethiopia because it's run by a madman the rest of them for the most part are pretty good narratives about strengthening of the public sector which ends up being a really interesting relationship to that index as a really recent problem so it just happened to find out about it recently what's that? as a really only recent problem so we just came up to light yeah well this is a 2006 index yes, I'd like to ask you some questions regarding the funding of this initiative as far as I understood up to now it was been funded by the newspaper I would like to ask you firstly, if the newspaper is owned by any company with political interest or something second question is the fact that you are providing with the resources of the newspaper so many stories for other newspapers that are actually competitors doesn't constitute as an incentive for the newspaper to keep doing this and thirdly into what extent this initiative is depending on you if for some reason you leave the newspaper will this initiative keep going or proceed? the ownership of the newspaper is a family run business in this country most of the newspapers are for the word it's a very successful newspaper it's the best selling newspaper in Brazil a quality paper very influential this project added to the credibility of the newspaper because we won several awards for that everybody was recognizing the newspaper as the major supporter of this idea which was related to more democracy and transparency in Brazil so I think the game for the newspaper was adding to its already good image some more elements that would last for a while and that's basically what the old media is all about being credible and influential and they have to stick with that in order to survive and compete with the new media which is pretty much sometimes the opposite not credible not much the image and not reliable but old media tends to be some of them very reliable, credible, influential and they have to build up on that in order to survive and to go through this very transition period in which we are right now all over the world so I think that's why they supported it and they're still supporting it now as far as the and put the the disincentive for the newspaper because it was fueling some competitors to write those stories I don't think that's a major issue it's an issue but it's not a major issue because we were knowing right from the beginning that would happen and what we did is before we put the database in line we prepared tons of stories so that we were ready to go at least at the same time as our competitors and we put the major stories before everybody because we knew beforehand everything and then you had all those stories that I chose but those were nice stories but they were not the major ones because the major ones were already published by us so I think that's just a major issue and the third point you said how much this project is depending on me well that's hard to say yes it is basically me because I run it since right from the beginning I had the idea but I don't have any plans to leave the newspaper or the internet so that's not something I have thought about and hopefully I can be there for a while and keep things on yes well indirectly yes I think as I said when you build up on your good image and you add to your credibility and how influential you are in the country and putting the news stories first and having the scripts oh no you had this million hits I was wondering if it bled over into the very sadly no and circulation has been stuck all over the world isn't it it's something like at most being stable just pretty much as here and as far as being stabilized it's good because otherwise it's going to go down that's what people say it's only a matter of time nobody knows how much time but it's a matter of time even more than what it has already declined in the past years it's been stable in Brazil the circulation of major newspapers in the past couple of years I would say yes please has anybody designed as a politician or withdrew from current elections at the time when this came out or has returned any money or given a donation or organization so they could stay in elected office or anything like that politicians are people built up without super egos so they just they just move ahead they lose face but they just go ahead no they've not designed they're running for office they said this is something from my enemies it's a misunderstanding understanding I've just explained it to you they just move ahead some of them have been facing legal charges as that governor but he is still a politician trying to run for office again and that's it the guy in jail the guy in jail we turn this into a movement so for this to happen in Brazil you already had on the books an incredibly useful law which is this patrimony law as far as political assets I'd love to get this law passed in Kenya that's not just Kenya it's a bad example I'd love to get it passed in Ghana which also let me talk about a country that I know you get to talk about China we'll stick to our own confidence I'd love to get this passed in Ghana at the same time this example is going to make Ghanaian politicians really nervous about it so how do we take what's a really exciting story what's clearly an amazing tool for journalists what in the long term will be a really good tool for citizens how do we export this revolution and is this something that you're actively trying to do having had such great success in Brazil I have been having lots of work already trying to keep this up so I have not had the chance to go international in a Trotskyist way Trotskyist like an international revolution or whatever but yes I think it will be wonderful if we could have something like that in other countries but way to do that as far as I learn from my experience as a journalist in the past 20 or so years is that no initiative would be successful without massive initiative like this will be of having a law passed like this one in other countries will never be successful without massive public support or a very with the various actors of that particular society involved truly involved and committed to do something like that so you have to start up putting together a as we did in Brazil for the freedom of information law a forum because it starts like a interest of a particular group take the story of the freedom of information act in this country you started up talking about freedom of information act or a freedom or right of access to public information back in 1954 because of those nuclear tests in the South Pacific then it took 12 or 14 years for Lyndon Johnson to sign up for the freedom of information law in this country so it's a very long process of getting something done it starts up generally in terms of public information within the journalistic environment because journalists work with information so they need it but this is something I've learned from the freedom of information act in this country less than 5% of the requests came from journalists themselves 95% 95% of the requests for public information at federal level in this country will come from people who are not journalists or working for media companies which tells you that there is a general demand and interest for that but journalists have to be involved at the beginning because they would be the ones who would be more willing to get they would be eager to have something like a law for politicians to disclose their personal assets so in Ghana I would say a good path would be to start up convincing news media major news companies to hop into that and try to get together and build up a movement and then aggregating more people from other sectors of the society that's what we did with the forum in Brazil we start up as journalists and then we invited judges, we invited businessmen, we invited lawyers everybody to be together and to show that this is in the general interest of society it's not a journalist's thing because journalists are nosy they want to have that and that's bad so we have to kind of have a broad initiative in order to be successful yes it's not so important about the information you have but just creating the idea of accountability the idea that someone is watching like for example I was trying to do this in Morocco it didn't happen because it was too sensitive for anyone to fund it but just putting down did your representative graduate from high school, you know just not even about their finances but just any sense of accountability and having that up on the web because you can't always wait for you know the reason I brought up Kenya at first was that a very dear friend of a number of ours here Oriel Kola, a former HLS student, former Berkman affiliate is running a site now in Kenya called Misalendo and what happened in the Kenyan parliament was the parliament paid to have a website done that had detailed dossiers on every parliamentarian and what happened was all over the place, you had parliamentarians who said well yes I have a doctorate from Oxford University and then their formal bio would go up on the website and it would say that they hadn't completed primary school and this was extremely embarrassing it was so embarrassing that the parliament website went live for three days and then was taken offline for two and a half years and these friends of mine who are Kenyan hackers basically got a full copy of the website and just put it up themselves and essentially said look you need to know this but it's a hard revolution to move in that case because really what it is are extremely resourceful Kenyan hackers but the media isn't behind them yet and in many ways this to me looks like a much more sustainable model get the media because the media know they need this data to quickly figure out how you build a coalition around the judiciary, around the lawyers, around other interested groups my guess on that, that US figure by the way of 95% is that it's not a lot of individuals dialing FOIA requests it's almost exclusively either corporations or NGOs and a lot of lobbyists really lots of inmates they don't have anything to do but I guess it has to be that civil society is a big champion and those figures about American freedom of information are available, anyone can go and look at them but yeah that's right yes perhaps they have preconceived notions of Brazil but how in a society there is so corrupt and everybody is so against it the politicians would vote about this patrimony law in the first place I don't quite understand that that's a really nice question it was in place for the past 40 years and has never been used by journalists or the media or anybody it was passed during the dictatorship so it were the generals who imposed that law on the politicians during the military dictatorship Brazil endured this right wing military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 21 years and back in the beginning of the dictatorship which was with the coup d'etat one of the main ideas of the coup d'etat was that they were coming in to get rid of the corruption politicians the corrupt politicians in Brazil and they enacted some laws like this one to show people that they were actually ridding corruption from Brazil but because we didn't have democracy and the politicians were all like people related to generals and to the the dictatorship the law was pretty much useless at the beginning then it was dormant for two decades in the world then we had democracy other things were at stake the return of the country to the democracy and then in the 90s people started up looking more at those laws that we have in our judicial framework and it started up trying to use that a little more and it culminated with this database when I decided to request all the documents filed by all the politicians because prior to that in the 90s which was very common was news to request only the declarations from people running for president or governor of Sao Paulo or senator of Rio important guys that would be there and then you wouldn't find anything wrong with those because they would know it would be difficult for them if they lied in those forms but then I decided to go in a broader way and requested all the declarations and then things begin to be a little more different but to answer your question the law was not passed by those politicians being shown here it was something very owed from dictatorship times so that's why it was possible I think I doubt if we didn't have that it would be possible to get that in an easy way right now right it was a sort of khaki that they're going to have such a dictatorship that they were not afraid of disclosure and that's why it passed yeah I think so yeah because the congress was tamed by the generals it was entirely controlled we still had it was very funny dictatorship because we had elections we had a congress it was a dictatorship they dominated everything we could not actually elect the people we wanted to have elected but it was like a fake democracy and it was a dictatorship and they because they thought they shouldn't be afraid of this they passed it and well fortunately enough it's been there and no one is going to remove it right now and the reason they were not afraid of it is because they knew they were going to keep it as a dictatorship yeah I think so yeah and they lasted for 21 years yeah yeah sometimes yeah not anymore now and it's well situation for journalists in Brazil is not the best one in the world but because I worked for a mainstream news media based in São Paulo so the threats against people like me would be minimized or minuscule war will not exist I would say nowadays but the situation in countryside states will be very fierce and I the only time I faced some direct threats was 11 years ago in 1997 when I put out this story about this scheme within the Brazilian congress this vote buying scheme congressmen were voting for money and they had some concrete evidence of it and some congressmen were expelled from congress it was a big scandal it lasted for three or four months then I got some direct threats by telephone and things like that the newspaper had to put a bodyguard to follow me around it lasted for three months but that was the last time it happened 11 years ago at the very beginning what made you use the database to do that because before this website do you have some examples for example to see some example in America or just you created the question was why I have decided to do this where did I get the idea from the answer is I've been always a computer internet junkie I've been going to this workshops about computer assisted reporting looking at experiences in other countries and most of the time here in this country and I thought I should do something there in Brazil I was kind of going through and touching the ground to see which one would be feasible and then I ended up doing this but I picked up examples from other countries most of the time from the United States I mentioned investigative reporters and editors IRE that's a very inspiring institution organization I would strongly recommend for journalists or anybody to go sometime to go and search and surf their website it's very enlightening it gives you lots of ideas of what to do with the internet along those lines Marcell, it's time to end so I think we will thank Fernando again for this really interesting project thank you