Welcome back to Slow News Days, a now-and-then newsletter on journalism and journalism-adjacent topics in the Philippines.
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After April 26 — the deadline for SIM card registration under a new law — more than half of the active SIM cards in the Philippines could end up being deactivated if efforts to promote registration fail to bring the proportion of those registered past the estimated 45% as of Friday.
The National Telecommunications Commission has already acknowledged that getting 100% of 168.9 million active SIM cards registered by the deadline is unlikely.
Earlier Sunday, Globe Telecom used a service usually reserved for emergency broadcasts and disaster alerts to remind users to register for the deadline.
Not quite how the Free Mobile Disaster Alerts Act meant for the system to be used, but SIM deactivation could mean loss of access to the internet, to messaging and banking apps, and to e-wallets, which would pretty much be a calamitous situation for millions in the Philippines.
RELATED: 'Mandatory SIM card registration puts privacy at risk, might not curb crime'
But what does that have to do with journalism? Quite a lot, actually.
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines has warned since October, shortly after the law was passed, that SIM card registration will affect how we do our work.
I don’t — because I am less careful than most about digital security — but many colleagues use burner phones when talking to sources and contacts.
Registration would put the anonymity of sources at risk, and could mean contacts and potential whistleblowers would be more hesitant to talk to us.
We are also worried about potential surveillance. The Department of Justice has assured the public that the law will not be used for that, but even if the DOJ during the Marcos Jr. administration sticks to that promise, we cannot be sure that the next presidents will.
We are worried that law enforcement and other government agencies will have easier access to our personal information when they are having trouble keeping their own records safe.
Anyway, we are worried about it enough to file a petition at the Supreme Court and ask for a temporary restraining order while the court decides on the issue.
RELATED: Why some groups are challenging mandatory SIM card registration before SC
Low registration numbers aside, the SIM card registration does seem popular, if you go by comments on social media, where the familiar argument of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” has been doing numbers again.
Vetoed in the waning months of the Duterte administration, SIM card registration hurdled Congress quickly under Marcos Jr., helped along by the near-universal experience of and annoyance at scam and spam text messages.
This is not the first time fear of some bogeyman (communists! fake news! hurt feelings!) has prompted legislation that would force citizens to choose between security and freedom and probably not the last.
Two things that could still happen before the 26th: The Supreme Court issuing a TRO on Tuesday, and the Department of Information and Communications Technology announcing an extension of the deadline.
In any case, as long as SIM card registration remains the rule, many of us will not be able to communicate as freely as we once used to.
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The new Hustle culture has been helped along by the old practice of outsourcing to cheaper labor. Rest of World looks at virtual assistants in the Philippines who earn hundreds of dollars a month but who also wrestle with issues of job security and benefits.
Every now and then, we do longer-form pieces on issues close to our hearts. Like a library program of the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology that will help Persons Deprived of Liberty read their way out (that is the actual name of the program). More longer reads from Philstar.com here.
Meanwhile, from Rappler, a profile of the Cariño family that has been fighting for Indigenous Peoples rights and human rights in general for generations.
And a scary story: The closure of Buzzfeed News (as online news jobs are cut across the world) while everyone else in online journalism tries to do increasingly more with increasingly less.