Before the s..t hit the fan, MCA head of Public Service and Complaints Department Datuk Michael Chong had previously, a week earlier on Nov 19, received the now infamous 70-second footage via MMS.

"I chose not to blow up the matter as the image of the police force had already been tarnished. By releasing it to the press, the whole force would be demoralised," he was reported as saying in a local daily.

Despite Chong's valiant attempt at preserving the smudgy burnish and morale of the police force, truth will come out, thanks in part to digital communication.

MMS is multimedia messaging service, allowing one cellphone user to send moving pictures to another user. The beauty of MMS, like any network, is that its value grows to the nth power of the number of people that use it. As at end-September, mobile operator Maxis boasted over seven million subscribers while DiGi had 4.2 million users. The other big telco, Celcom, accounted for 6.1 million users as at end-June.

That's a lot of cellphone users, although admittedly not all of those cellphones have MMS.

Stop circulating the frontpage newsmaking clip, appealed MCA Youth chief Liow Tiong Lai and his party's lady parliamentarian Chew Mei Fun to the public. Even so, attempting to stop the torrent of public curiosity and outrage is like sticking fingers to stop New Orleans' levee breaches after Katrina hit.

The footage, showing a fair-skinned woman stripped naked and forced to do ear squats in a police lock-up, has been described by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as shameful and a blow to the country's image. In an eerie parallel with Katrina, it is the shenanigans of the powers-that-be following the disaster, in this case our police, that has had the country up in arms.

Marching tide of technology

In the good old days, it was so much easier for the ancient regime to black out what they deem to be unsavoury news. Or else, we only got the sanitised version, edited and suitably slanted by channels of information that are government-linked or directly controlled by the ruling parties.

But today, anyone with a cellphone or Internet access can see the entire video clip showing what had occurred at the Petaling Jaya district police headquarters lock-up.

The authorities have not denied the authenticity of this clip. They are strangely more keen to take action against the person who "insulted the modesty" of the woman, i.e. the eyewitness who documented the abuse.

The constable standing with arms akimbo has been identified but Deputy Inspector-General of Police Musa Hassan, in his statements, appears to have exonerated her of insulting the modesty of the woman detainee. The constable was merely "carrying out a routine check", he says.

This may be "the first documented evidence" in the words of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak whom I presume is referring to the visual recording format of police abuse. Or simply this is just the first worm to crawl out of the proverbial can.

However, this is certainly not the only documented abuse, which includes "custodial deaths", that has occurred at the gentle hands of our trusted police. In fact, just prior to this incident, four Chinese nationals complained of sexual harassment.

Information Communication Technology (ICT) allows us to access the message in this instance, the police poster girl video clip bypassing the traditional messenger (mass media) which the government keeps a tight leash on through its requirement for the annual renewal of publishing or broadcasting licenses.

In the past, the political masters of traditional media could mediate the message or news passed down from on-high to passive recipients. You picked up a newspaper, you read its contents. The reporter and his editors dictate the tone of the reports. For example, New Straits Times readers have been told that the clip mentioned above was "lewd footage".

What? No nudity please, we're a Muslim country? "Lewd" is the mediator's choice of word, his take on the event. Was the woman a willing participant in the obscenity, as "lewd footage" seems to indicate? Or was the nude woman a victim of the naked abuse of power? What was obscene, really?

Thanks to the wired world of the 21st century, Netizens have been empowered with a new vocabulary, the word of mouse in online discussion rooms and weblogs. Or participative "citizen journalism", as malaysiakini would put it. Technology is changing the way we receive and perceive news.

Cellphone, a lethal weapon

The frame of reference in which news is disseminated and interpreted has also evolved. MMS, for instance, is a lateral exchange of news and images between peers. Traditional mass media, on the other hand, features top-down flow of filtered information from the authority to the general populace.

Traditionally, the officially-sanctioned media never fails to turn to venerable leaders to spin and shape events for us. Hence in a typical TV bulletin or news article, the coverage of an important event is reported solely in terms of pronouncements, or what certain VVIPs "said today" in relation to the event's actual happening.

Malaysia's VVIPs wear the honorific Datuk (elder or grandfather) title. These Datuks are usually called upon to do a lot of explaining to the unenlightened rakyat.

From Datuk Musa Hassan, the deputy IGP: "There will not be any cover-up, and anyone involved in illegal activity, like recording or even using a phone in a restricted area, will be brought to book."

Just in case we did not fully comprehend him the first time around, the Datuk elaborated the next day: "It is the perpetrator behind the video footage whom we are after and not the policewoman, who was carrying out a routine check."

The deputy police chief has indeed given us an instructive insight into the order of priorities governing this internal investigation.

And all that column space devoted to the Datuk's comments amounts, in essence, to this: 1) a dangerous person is at large armed with a cellphone; 2) the police are on his trail because he has done something illegal by recording with his camera phone; and 3) using a phone in a restricted area - the police lock-up being classified as such by the said Datuk - may land a person in the lock-up as well.

Do I sense a typical example of Malaysia Boleh reality checkmate here?

Cyberspace, the final frontier

Faced with our officialdom's staunch attachment to the Denial Syndrome, what are we to believe? Rumours?

That deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim was to be sacked was a rumour. That finance minister Daim Zainuddin would resign was a rumour. That there would be a hike in petrol prices was a rumour. Don't believe in rumours, we're told.

"Rumours" that in the past were spread in kopitiams are today transmitted by the tools of global connectivity, the cellphone and Internet. They are shared faster and go further.

My American friend Michael in Washington DC commented, "The despicable performance of the police in the naked Chinese woman incident bears a frightening resemblance to the actions of the American military guards who so degraded prisoners in the infamous Iraq and Gitmo lockups."

Another German friend Wilhelm in Hamburg had this to say, "My country may have many problems but at least one can be sure human rights are protected."

Globalisation, anyone?

As the Westerners can log on to our news, so can Malaysians to theirs. We can access reputable news outlets abroad that are more objective and don't pull the punches, ironically, in order to read what is happening domestically.

Let us grant that the Internet is a tool that allows the Average Johari a higher degree of involvement and engagement in the news gathering process.

But before we celebrate this possible liberalisation from home-based news sources, however, I need to insert a note of caution. Turning more Malaysians into savvy surfers is not the magic bullet that will reform our uncritical reading habit if there lacks ingrained training to ensure we will seek a balanced input and that we process the input rationally. There is always the risk that the Net user would go only to those sites that serve to reinforce his existing bias.

Even seasoned journalists who should know better are not wary of this pitfall. For example, my friend and ex-colleague Charles F Moreira, in a letter to malaysiakini , recommends eight websites for a better understanding about the Palestinian issue. All the sites he recommended were pro-Palestinian and/or left-wing, including the PLO's site and a columnist who's avowedly anti-Israel.

At the end of the day, a tool is only as good as the skill with which we wield it. If that area of the brain we use for critical thinking continues to remain a "restricted zone", shackled by our fear of the police state, no amount of technological gizmos will improve our capacity to understand the events happening around us.

To make good use of the free world's advanced technology, we need to free our minds for advanced thinking first.