FEARLESS REPORTERS BREAK SILENCE AT RISK OF THEIR LIVES

Luis Horacio Najera first stared death in the face when he was 19. A police
officer was lying in the wreckage of his car after a catastrophic accident,
and Najera, then a young journalism intern, found himself reluctantly
watching as the dying man met his gaze.

"In life, there's a spark in the eyes," he said. "In death, I saw, they are
like marbles."

It was a premonition of the many horrific deaths Najera would be reporting
as a journalist on Mexico's violent borders. And one that haunted him
through years of death threats while documenting abuses of human rights by
drug cartels and Mexican security forces.

On Thursday, Najera will be one of five journalists honored for "fearless
reporting" by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. Other award-winners
include his Mexican colleague, Emilio Gutierrez Soto, and imprisoned
Cameroon journalists Serge Sabouang and Robert Mintya. Bibi Ngota, who was
editor of the Cameroon Express and died in detention, will receive a
posthumous award. The group's 2010 Vox Libera award goes to The Citizen Lab
research program at University of Toronto.

For journalists in the world's danger zones, fear is ever present. Last
year more than 130 died in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Media workers are soft targets for criminals, terrorists and authoritarian
governments.

"You have to live with your fears," Najera said in Toronto this week. "Fear
itself makes you brave. You must treat it as a weapon not a weakness."

Najera, who began his career as a sports reporter, learned that quickly
when he transferred to investigative reporting in Mexico's most notoriously
violent area. Close friends were cut down for exposing criminality and
corruption, as well as the security forces' brutal prosecution of the "war
on drugs."

As a reporter for Grupo Reforma based in Ciudad Juarez, Najera worked on
both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. But for four years, starting in 2004,
his reports on illegal trafficking, gun smuggling, corruption and the drug
trade brought threats that escalated alarmingly.

"Once an officer put a rifle to my chest," he said. "Another time I was
followed while I was driving on the road, and a car came up beside me. They
rolled down the window and I could see the AK47."

A more subtle warning hit home two years ago, when Najera was preparing to
publish a detailed report on human rights abuses and a police officer he
counted on for information whispered "be careful."

With his wife and three children - now aged three to 19 - he packed with
lightning speed and fled to Canada, landing in Vancouver as an asylum seeker.

"The threats were not just against me, but my family," said the tall, husky
40-year-old. "That was too much. I knew I had no right to go on putting
them at risk."

Still, he bitterly regrets the shrinking pool of investigative reporters in
Mexico, who have been forced to choose between "silence and death."

Mexico, Najera says, is still not a democracy as we know it. And until
there is enough investment in education to give young people a better
future, many more will turn to crime, and more - including journalists -
will die.

The threats that The Citizen Lab, and director Ron Deibert, deal with are
of a different, nature, and a magnitude as large as cyberspace.

"What consumes most of our time is malware attacks and cyber-espionage," he
says, referring to the malicious software that can crash computers and rob
them of vital data, and spy systems that can compromise entire countries'
computer systems.

On the cutting edge of Internet crime research, Citizen Lab's 15 or so
staff and 100 associates also report on censorship in 70 countries through
an underground network of contributors. And it investigates cyber-attacks
on rights groups and opposition members in authoritarian countries,
including an electronic assault on the office of the Dalai Lama.

The increase in attacks, he says, is "huge. Every week there's another
organization saying they've been assaulted. It's just exploding."

Governments have dramatically changed their approach to cyberspace, Deibert
said. "They used to be largely ignorant, now they realize it's a key
strategic domain. The arms race has moved to cyberspace."