Tall order for authorities to stop Edisi Siasat, says expert

 

Edisi Siasat, now known as Edisi Khas, has implicated top government officials, including those from the police and the MACC, of wrongdoing.

PETALING JAYA: It will be difficult for the authorities to track down those behind Edisi Siasat, the Twitter account that has been publishing exposes on corruption and abuse of power, a security expert said.

Cyber security expert Siraj Jalil said those behind Edisi Siasat were either based abroad or they were in Malaysia using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to hide their whereabouts. A VPN allows users to hide their Internet Protocol (IP) address, preventing anyone from tracking their whereabouts.

The Twitter account, which recently changed its name to Edisi Khas, has created quite a buzz over its tweets implicating top government officials, including those from the police and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

In November last year, Inspector-General of Police Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani revealed that police had opened 13 investigation papers into Edisi Siasat.

Siraj Jalil.

Siraj said censorship was not an option for the authorities as only Twitter could ban the account.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco in the US, is known to stand for freedom of expression, and getting the social media giant to remove tweets or accounts or asking it to reveal a Twitter handler’s details is not an easy task.

He said it was highly unlikely that Twitter would entertain any request to provide any IP address to the authorities. However, if a VPN failure occurred, it could reveal the Edisi Siasat administrator’s real internet protocol address, he said.

One police source, who declined to be named, voiced concern that Edisi Siasat’s methods of publishing their so-called expose could embolden others to attack certain parties or individuals behind the anonymity of the internet.

“These days, when something that seems sensational is shared on social media, it won’t be long before it goes viral. This is dangerous,” the source told FMT, adding that this could “disrupt public order”. - FMT