Editorial

May Day – the day dedicated to the workers of the world, started in America – is now commemorated in that country in September as a public holiday. The significance of the day was to be taken over by the Marxist states of yesteryear, but they have since embraced private enterprise and given up massive political rallies, instead turning the day into one of festivities. Unfortunately, there is no international day dedicated to the unemployed.

In Sri Lanka, May Day became a political muscle-flexing parade, not a celebration of workers, with people bussed in from the provinces to shout slogans all for a lunch packet and a bottle of arrack and union leaders walking behind the party’s political leadership. At one stage, the right-of-centre UNP Government called this ‘primitive’ and had a musical show with Indian artists, something the former Marxist states do now.

This year, Poya full moon day coincided with May Day, and while the disorganised Opposition trotted out the excuse not to hold a rally, the Government was keen to keep its own political machinery oiled with its own rally, red flags fluttering side by side with Buddhist flags along the streets.

More important than all the political slogan shouting, however, would be the need to fast-track pending reforms on labour laws and the updating and amalgamation of 14 of the 31 Acts into one Code that will govern the subject in a world that has changed into a more commercially competitive global environment. In recent years, Sri Lanka has lagged behind many countries in Asia in economic growth and prosperity due to many factors, not least its retarded labour laws that frighten investors and big business with capital. They opt for other countries as a result.

India has already updated its laws, partly because they began the process earlier. Even now, ruling party interference in the cabinet-appointed experts panel continues, with their MPs throwing their weight around, demanding priority for trade union rights with an eye on votes rather than what is best for the country’s business, investment and economic growth. The President should ensure this panel is permitted to do its work independently and that policy decisions are taken only after they have submitted their proposals.

Coinciding with International Labour Day is World Press Freedom Day, which falls today, May 3. Sri Lanka has improved marginally in some sort of World Press Freedom Index from the 150th worst to 139th last year. These global indices, though, are questionable. Israel is in 116th place for press freedom at home while deliberately targeting and killing foreign journalists in Gaza and Lebanon. Do they not get demerit points for that? Last year, Sri Lanka had 11 incidents documented involving journalists’ security.

Elsewhere, artificial intelligence (AI) is making waves in changing the face of journalism as it is known today. Big tech companies are stealing the content from traditional media sources and profiting by uploading them onto their platforms. Australia is giving the lead to tax tech giants Meta, Google, TikTok, etc., by ordering them to pay for the hard work journalists do in ferreting the news. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the unauthorised use of published material work to train those in AI technologies. At home, morning breakfast shows on television channels are no different, making a commercial benefit out of reading from what the mainstream newspapers have painstakingly gathered and at a cost to the newspaper house.

Challenges are many for the media, and they are not only from outside the industry but from within as well.

Growing concerns over cybersecurity risks

Hot on the heels of the recent multibillion NDB digital raid come several other reported frauds and failures of digital transactions in banks and public institutions. These show a grim picture of Sri Lanka’s digital future – a combination of theft, fraud, neglect, absence of safeguards, bureaucratic incompetence, negligence, corruption, ‘higher level’ connivance, and lack of cybersecurity – all with the ‘Dark Web’ watching.

Even the Central Bank’s role is under scrutiny, including its supervisory function (or lack of it). Ironically it was only the other day the Governor justified a staggering pay raise for his staff, saying it is otherwise difficult to retain such exceptionally qualified people.

While the Government has identified digitalisation as a key to the nation’s progress, and related initiatives have been launched at its highest levels with accelerated digitalisation of key government and financial transactions (including those using citizens’ private data), the accompanying human, technical and procedural cybersecurity ecosystem is far behind. Bureaucratic protocols relevant to paper-based decision-making are inadequate for cyber governance in an age of instantaneous digital correspondence and transactions. One of the reasons globally cited for transitioning to a digital economy is that it eliminates the corrupt ‘human hand’, but there are other vulnerabilities in cyberspace.

Globally, even those countries which are most advanced digitally are facing new and bigger challenges in cybersecurity. It was only last week that we referred to the world’s tech companies that are now collectively trying to mitigate the challenges unleashed by Claude Mythos software to existing digital systems that run much of the world’s critical infrastructure, including the world’s banks, and the danger of cyber adversaries and bad actors having access to such dangerous technology. An IT expert has informed this newspaper about an experience he had—which demonstrates a security risk on the Sri Lanka visitor application website where passport details (full name, nationality, passport number, etc.) of foreigners are available for others to see. (Detailed story on page 8)

The worst part of it is that this information was brought to the attention of the Government’s digital czar back in October last year, and all that was done was to forward the information to ICTA (Information Communication Technology Association) and SLCERT (Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team). The information was taken up by the Immigration Department, but bureaucratic logjams and a fear to rectify the glitch due to legal and procedural issues confronting the department with its former chief in remand. It is a textbook case of what is amiss with implementing the government’s much-vaunted ‘Digital Sri Lanka’ that is being trumpeted around.

It is a no-brainer that these cybersecurity agencies, all round, in the public and private sectors need a wake-up call as Sri Lanka’s digital infrastructure increasingly comes under siege.