The Cybercrime Law, overeager as it is and dragged down by the Sotto amendment, is an anomaly. It requires an amendment. The TRO issued by the Supreme Court gives both chambers of Congress the opportunity to prepare the amendments.

Having said that, another point is worth noting. All those alarums about cyber libel and creeping authoritarianism, given the realities in the country, have been hyped to the highest decibel. In the Philippine context, history tells us that only the law-abiding citizens file libel charges with all earnestness. They do this to seek redress for a real grievance. Only those who genuinely feel that they had been attacked/smeared by a segment of the media that has been bought and paid for go to the courts to clear their names and vindicate their reputations.

The powers-that-be, and these are the top politicians and corporate people, use libel filings as nuisance suits – while planning the way out of their misdeeds and indiscretions. Libel is just a transition thing. The libel cases they file give them time to plan out for Plan B or Plan C – either of which is often sinister and ugly.

If filing libel suits in earnest against media workers is not a favored option of those who want to get back at media on the quick - and with their message fully delivered -, then what do they usually do? Those brutal enough carry out the “Maguindanao routine.”

We all know what this means. First you hire goons—plenty of blood-thirsty goons—to waylay a media convoy.

The goons, with blood-shot eyes and the smell of death in their decaying breaths, herd the already terrified media workers onto a deeply-hollowed earth, the backhoe that just did the digging menacingly standing by.

Bullets mow down the media workers—all in a state of shock and bewilderment. Their limp bodies are pushed into the mass grave. The elongated steel arm of the backhoe, joined by tough rivets at the middle to give it utmost flexibility, is then maneuvered to beat down on the limp bodies of media workers now deposited at the pit, to make sure that death is not enough—they have to suffer more and not a bone of their limp body should be left unbroken.

The masterminds and the actual killers treat media, especially provincial media as dirt, when they are of no use to them.

The fear and panic that the hired goons saw on the faces of the media workers just intensified their bloodlust making the massacre an even more pleasurable act.

In case the quarry is a particularly- hated journalist, and you don’t need to carry out mass killing of media people, bike-riding goons in ski masks can just knock on the door of the target. There is no regard for the gender. Take the case of crusading Mindanao journalist Marilyn Esperat. She was shot dead as she opened her door to the gunmen.

Ok, what about government? Will it not use the law to bully, threaten or imprison critics in media?

If governments were like the current one, combative but always taking its fights public, there is very little to fear. On its most celebrated fight so far, the one that involved the ouster of a sitting chief justice, we learned one thing, The Aquino government fights with passion, at times with clumsy passion, but there is nothing covert about the tools and methods employed in the efforts to oust Corona. The president never held anything—the strategies and tactics on how to oust Corona—close to his chest.

The lies and the trumped-up charges manufactured by the martial law regime against the president’s father, the Kafkaesque trial of Ninoy Aquino and the sham witnesses presented against him, are probably lingering nightmares in the Aquino family up to now. It is these nightmares that are behind the chosen methods of combat of PNoy when he fights – which are all open and transparent.

Even when he is simply mad at somebody, like for example at Arroyo alter-ego Noli de Castro, the president will just vent out his rage without much provocation, without regard for whether than forum is proper or not for venting out rage.

We have a president who has not much use for a cyber crime law. He probably finds spying on journalists or doing covert investigations on them demeaning and below the presidency. PNoy is neither Tricky Dick nor Kremlin in his relationship with the media.

Those who worked for the” mosquito press “ also have a sense on how the late Joe Burgos would react to the cyber crime law. He would register a token protest. After that, he would test the law, the whole brutality and impunity of the law. Joe Burgos feared nothing. He never whined against oppressive press laws. He just mocked and defied all institutions of repression—and published with neither fear nor favor. His Malaya, this was an iron-clad rule, was no place for wimps.

The whole martial law apparatus never inconvenienced Joe Burgos’s dogged pursuit of the truth.

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