APRIL 20 — For the past two weeks, the country was focussed on the just-concluded Sarawak elections. Now that the results are out and we know that Barisan Nasional will once again form the state government, what are some of the lessons learnt from it?

Leaving aside the political ramifications of the elections to the pundits and analysts, one significant development I noted happened in the run-up to the elections a couple of days before the political campaigning closed last Friday instead of during the election itself.

The Malaysian Insider reported that according to the founder of the Sarawak Report, Clare Rewcastle-Brown, the Sarawak Report website and its associated Radio Free Sarawak (RFS) broadcast station had allegedly been interfered with.

In the case of Sarawak Report, the website had allegedly “sustained three days of unremitting cyber-attacks and it had to go on the run for a few days until the election.”

Rewcastle-Brown, who operates the site, was quoted as saying that “the chances are that we will not last long at any given address, so please do download and pass on our material and viral out our current email addresses.”

The sister-in-law of the former British premier Gordon Brown noted that Sarawak Report (SR) was supposedly under a “Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)” attack across the weekend, bringing the site down just days before Sarawak went to vote on April 16.  What this simply means in lay terms is that her website was inundated with an overwhelming number of requests — made by bots or specialised programmes — designed to flood it to the point that the Sarawak Report’s servers handling the load weren’t able to cope thereby rendering it inaccessible to the public.

As a result, Rewcastle-Brown was forced to keep changing SR’s address in order to keep it going.

As for RFS, airwaves transmitted from abroad were allegedly interfered with by presumably an unknown source at a specific frequency range — 15,425kHz, right next to RFS’s transmitting frequency of 15,420kHz, according to Rewcastle-Brown, who operates the station from London.

Another press report suggested that someone had been paid to interfere with RFS’s signal — by overwhelming it with a very much stronger (200-kilowatt) signal — and that it originated from Belgium.

In the age of the Internet, DDoS attacks are quite rampant and these attacks are hardly surprising anymore. But what struck me was that there were even people who went out of the way to try and thwart RFS.

RFS transmits at a fairly low frequency of about 15,000kHz, which is defined as shortwave band (3,000kHz to 30,000kHz). Shortwave has the ability to propagate at a much further distance compared to regular FM transmissions. Generally speaking, the lower the frequency, the wider and further radio broadcasts propagate.

But what makes shortwave special and ideal as an effective medium of transmission is that it is able to travel further than other forms of transmission not just because of its lower frequency but also because of its ability to use the atmosphere as a reflective layer bending the waves from one side of the world to another. 

The implication is that listeners over on one side of the world are able to receive transmissions from another remote part of the world. This is how BBC’s shortwave World Service operates, which has long brought news from London to other remote parts of the world.

Perhaps this is why the powers that be, who are against the opposition movement in Sarawak, allegedly tried to interfere with the transmission. 

What’s significant about these episodes, if they were true, is the fact that both high-tech and low-tech methods were used to allegedly disrupt Sarawak Report and RFS. 

The chief aim of such moves? To disrupt, or at the very least, to restrict the free flow of information to people.

In recent months, the world has witnessed an unprecedented number of revolts and uprisings beginning with Tunisia and Egypt. Much has been said about the use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to galvanise the people’s voices and organise dissent against the ruling power.

And long before the use of social media, the Philippines organised “people power” protests against the government in 2001, using merely a humble tool known as SMS, to rally 700,000 people in a bid to oust the then president, Joseph Estrada.

While these tools did help, true people power lies not so much in the tools that are used to galvanise people but in the wide propagation of credible information that makes sense and appeals to the conscience of a democratic society. This is what will eventually resonate with the citizens of a country and call them into action.

The battleground for future political power, therefore, cannot be just about using age-old communication strategies aired over usual channels to promulgate government propaganda. And certainly, it can no longer be about controlling or restricting the free flow of information to citizens. 

It’s hard to gauge how definitive the direct impact Rewcastle-Brown’s RFS and Sarawak Report had on last week’s election. 

But it must have worried certain people enough and have had somewhat of an impact if it were true that they did take remedial action against her organisation and didn’t leave it to chance to discover what would have happened had they not otherwise acted upon it.

In the final analysis, one thing’s clear: Her unrelenting efforts to propagate as much accurate information as possible using whatever technology — high tech or otherwise — at her disposal is a blueprint for how future elections will be won.

Ultimately, we as citizens must realise the tremendous impact free-flowing and accurate information can play in elections and continue championing issues like the non-censorship of the Internet and the use of any technology means available to keep everyone informed.

Besides making sure we go to the polls, this is how we can be prepared for what’s to come when much more — our country’s 13th General Election — is at stake.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.