The war room

Source: Mosquito Mail

(File Photo)

These days, according to a Malacañang Palace mole, President Noynoy Aquino goes around with a strange fashion accessory—a sheaf of papers folded and tucked under his upper arm. From time to time, Aquino can be seen reading from the plain-paper sheaf, as if he has to remember something that he had just read in it.

What’s printed on the papers isn’t some state secret or even some important policy. It’s just the 1987 Constitution that any schoolboy can read in the library or download from the Internet for his homework.

Why Aquino wants to keep a copy of the charter handy at all times is anybody’s guess. Perhaps he’s memorizing his supposed constitutional defense of his Disbursement Acceleration Program pork barrel fund?

Still, I wonder why Aquino has to keep insisting that his pork allocations are justified by the Constitution, according to his own personal reading of it, when he already has the country’s biggest team of legal aides working for him full time in the Office of the Solicitor General, the presidential legal counsel and the Department of Justice to do the justifying for him. In any case, I think Aquino should have gone through the charter a long time ago, not just now, more than three years into his term.

It’s enough to make me revise my pet nickname of “Boy Sisi” into something more current, still using the initials of his first two given names. Perhaps I shall now call him “Boy Saligang-Batas” Aquino.

* * *

The hacking of this newspaper’s increasingly popular Web site, I’m told, has gone on unabated. And some sources have informed me that this malicious activity is being conducted in the Malacañang “war room,” a high-tech monitoring and online intervention facility that was built during the time of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo but used extensively and “weaponized” for propaganda black ops only by this administration.

The war room is located in an old National Intelligence Coordinating Agency building inside the palace grounds across the river from the main palace, where both Aquino’s official residence, Bahay Pangarap, and the Presidential Security Group headquarters are also located. The facility was built through the efforts of an Arroyo super-supernumerary, a woman so close to the former President that she was suspected of acting as the ex-Chief Executive’s “bag lady.”

People who have gone into the war room said it used to be called Arroyo’s “situation room,” adorned with banks of big-screen computer monitors that give it a “Dr. No” feel, or the aura of NORAD headquarters. It’s also equipped with a working bar and its own kitchen, supposedly so that the President can stay in it for long periods of time while “monitoring the situation” online and through surveillance cameras.

Arroyo herself hardly ever set foot in the building during her term, I’m told. But for the tech-savvy gamer who replaced her in office, the situation room (quickly renamed the “war room”) was heaven-sent.

This is where Aquino stays when he disappears for long periods during the day (or for days on end). And the war room is also were the online monitoring, propaganda and hacking effort is based.

Yes, Virginia, there is a computer geek hacker paradise in the palace, and your taxes and mine are being used to pay for it. And guess who’s in charge of all of that, as well?

* * *

But we’re talking about the hacking of this paper’s site (and other perceived anti-Aquino Web pages, it’s safe to assume), which I’ve already discussed in a previous column and which goes on, to this day. I’ve also discussed this with my boss, MST’s very patient and amiable publisher, Rollie Estabillo, who assures me that steps are being taken so that people who want to read this column and other articles in the paper aren’t redirected to a porn site or don’t get other such denial-of-service messages, as they still sometimes do.

I hope the counter-measures work. But I also know that even the most secure official Web sites in the US, where the government has all the motivation and resources to keep their data secure, are hacked from time to time.

Personally, since I am no longer in charge of MST’s day to day operations, I can only ask readers for more understanding. The famed “mosquito press” that helped bring down Ferdinand Marcos and other efforts all over the world to get the truth out also suffered similar repressive measures in the past, whether from brutal dictatorships militantly against freedom of speech or from outwardly benign rulers, who profess to love democracy.

But in the end, the truth always comes out. Sooner or later, the people will know.

I also take some consolation from the Streisand Effect, named after the reclusive American popular singer. A decade ago, Barbra Streisand sued to stop the online publication of photographs of her California mansion, taken as part of a series of publicly-available photos documenting that state’s coastline.

Instead of preventing the photos of her house from spreading, the suit called attention to them, making them go viral. I wait for the same thing to happen to the truths that this administration wants suppressed.

Email: mosquitomail2013@gmail.com

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