2014 Atlantic Journalism Awards Finalists
Attachments
| Slug/Label | Operation Osprey |
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| Date Aired or Published | October 21 - 23, 2014 |
| Media outlet where first aired or published: | CBC Radio One |
| Name of Program: | Information Morning |
| If co-produced, list partner: | n/a |
| Location: | n/a |
| List awards, grants: | n/a |
| Running time (TV/Radio): | Apx 35 minutes current affairs and 10 minutes news clips/ voicers |
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Short explanation of the story and how it developed: Operation Osprey: A bird, an IT crisis, and a cover-up “Operation Osprey” was what internal emails dubbed a government of New Brunswick IT crisis in the summer of 2014. To the public and the media, there were some apparent issues with the public-facing government website and with the computers at Service New Brunswick locations. What was not apparent was that there was so much chaos abounding inside government departments that it had been given a code name and a “war room” had been set up. Government email was down, programs used by court clerks, prosecutors and judges, healthcare providers, child protective services social workers, finance employees, and more were all incapacitated. It would take months for the true scope of the problem to become clear. When the newsroom began to inquire, communications officers said that a power outage had occurred and that it was “so significant” it impacted the backup power systems at the government’s main data centre. The government also said “Staff worked all day Monday on repairs and were able to return most of the GNB network to operation by Monday evening, including the SNB website. Other systems were brought back up Tuesday morning and the GNB website was restored at around 3 pm yesterday. Most internal systems that were offline are up and running as of today.” In fact, what the communications officers refused to disclose was that the while some systems were up, others continued to be down for days, and data corruption issues plagued some departments for weeks to come. Further, it would take more than a month for the data centre infrastructure to be repaired and replaced. The communications coming from government were misleading on the cause of the data centre meltdown as well. When CBC News asked the power corporation about what made the outage “so significant” the response was quizzical, that in fact there was nothing out of the ordinary about the outage. Hundreds of ospreys build nests on transmission towers in N.B. annually. What the CBC News investigation would reveal was that in fact it was the state of the infrastructure, critical to keeping government services operating, that was the issue. It was decades old. One internal email from a technician remarked “it’s all junk”. Because CBC News was facing a stone wall on the issue, it filed two Right to Information requests which yielded four boxes of records. The records laid out the narrative before the journalists’ eyes. The details of the meltdown and efforts to recover, the emotions running through departments – the civil servants unable to do their work, and the exhausted IT technicians trying to recover their programs, and, perhaps most interestingly, the discourse on what to tell the public and what to withhold with regards to the government’s nerve centre going down. The truth would only appear after digging through the Right to Information records. Even after the documents were in hand, communications officers ignored calls and emails. All queries to multiple departments were funnelled through one office, which spat out the same blanket response each time, if it responded at all. No research interviews, no on-air interviews. When the boxes revealed their cache of information, emails between communications officials showed there was little respect for truth and transparency and disregard for the public’s right to know. The story evolved from a continued-coverage piece to a 3-day series on the outage, the lack of transparency, and the state of openness in the province more broadly. The story lent itself particularly well to radio treatment in this regard. Talk-tapes between the reporter and show hosts allowed the journalists to lay out the investigation in great detail, while full on-air interviews with transparency watchdogs, such as the Access to Information and Privacy Commissioner, allowed us to take a step back from the details, and look together, with the audience, at what the story was showing more broadly. The Right to Information request response had contained a letter from the Premier to his Chief Clerk, ordering a review of the outage – a fact which went unknown and unreported until the investigation. CBC News also obtained a document which showed that it was an Ernst and Young internal audit that had been commissioned. The Auditor General too, told CBC News her office would be performing an audit of the crash as well. Weeks after the CBC News investigation aired, the Ernst and Young audit came out of hiding, and the province’s Chief Information Officer admitted the outage, which cost $1.6 million to recover from, could and should have been avoided. In January 2015 the Auditor General’s report was released. It called for an overhaul of IT services in the province as a result of her examination of the outage. The government has agreed, and is currently undertaking a restructuring and clear organization and assignment of roles, responsibilities and authorities. For our submission, we have included a shortened mp3 of two talk-tapes between reporter, Rachel Cave and Information Morning radio host, Terry Seguin. This audio was a small part of the multiple on-air interviews, radio news voicers, and news and current affairs follow-ups generated by this story. We have included links to two radio interviews, one with the Access to Information and Privacy Commissioner, and one with the Auditor General. Thank you for your consideration of our submission. Myfanwy Davies, Information Morning Angela Gilbert, CBC News I-Unit |
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Resources of the newsroom (money and time) available to complete the story: The story was pursued primarily by two journalists. When it came time to go into production, a reporter was assigned and the required digital, television and radio resources worked on the story and its airing in parts, as needed. The most resource-consuming task was poring over and organizing the information contained in the Right to Information release. It took about two full weeks to process the often times dense, technical information. |
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