Follow the slime…

Whoever came up with the expression ‘snail mail’ to refer to traditional postage (as opposed to the instantaneous electronic version we are now perhaps more accustomed to) clearly didn’t pause to consider the implications.

Like letters, snails and other gastropods do indeed travel at a ve-e-e-ry slow pace. But they also leave a glistening, slimy trail behind them… unwittingly betraying their entire history of movement for all to see.

As anyone who has ever forwarded an email will confirm, this latter detail has far more in common with electronic mail than with the more traditional – though less traceable – method of posting correspondence in the nearest letter-box.

So while ‘snail mail’ is undeniably a less convenient way to communicate over distance, it remains considerably more secure.

The other Jason

Among the many to have (belatedly) realised this to their own cost was PN secretary general Paul Borg Olivier, who ‘accidentally’ included the wrong Jason (Micallef instead of Azzopardi) in the recipient field when sending a confidential email to all Cabinet members in 2008. Not only did the error give rise to a neologism to describe precisely this sort of indiscretion – now often referred to as ‘doing a PBO’ – but it also revealed the existence of a direct link between ministries/government departments and the Nationalist Party headquarters in Pieta’… with worrying implications for democracy.

On that occasion, Borg Olivier had asked Cabinet members to forward constituents’ complaints to the PN in order to co-ordinate responses: in the process, blurring the lines that have traditionally separated party and government, and more cogently confirming that which many of us had long suspected: how deeply intertwined the supposedly distinct offices of government and Nationalist Party have grown in the past 25 years.

The same blunder also provided graphic proof of a vote-buying/election-rigging racket, whereby the party in government is granted unlawful access to private citizens’ complaints – allowing Elcom, the PN’s electoral office, to identify and target dissatisfied Nationalist voters, and provide whatever service is necessary to get them back into the fold.

In any serious democracy, evidence of such blatant collusion between government ministries and political parties would warrant, at minimum, high level resignations… as well as the possibility of criminal charges in the many countries were such information exchange is illegal.

In Malta, on the other hand – where laws are drafted by the party in government for the benefit of the party in government – it resulted only in the usual knee-jerk reaction, whereby the same old coterie of government apologists simply closed ranks to limit the damage.

If there was any serious concern at all regarding the apparent merger between Maltese State and PN, it never rose above the occasional sardonic comment in the online media. In practice, life went on usual – and so did the illicit flow of information between government and PN.

From Castille with love

In recent months and weeks, there have been several further indications that information traffic is at its peak. Once again, Borg Olivier was the centre of another exposed leak, when he very nonchalantly produced a confidential Cabinet memo on a live TV discussion programme: despite the fact that he is not part of Cabinet, and that as PN general secretary he is quite frankly not entitled to confidential government information of this nature (with good reason: if he were, then the same document would have to also be made available to the party in Opposition).

Curiously, Borg Olivier this time chose to brush off all criticism by incriminating the Prime Minister instead. He claimed to have sought, and obtained, Dr Gonzi’s permission to use the document – for all the world as though this particular detail, even if true, would make any difference to the argument at hand.

What Borg Olivier omitted to mention is that the Prime Minister has no authority to simply incorporate the secretary-general of his own party as a non-card holding member of the Cabinet of Ministers… at least, not without changing the Constitution first.

Another detail that escaped Borg Olivier’s notice is that the leak between OPM and PN is actually illegal, and punishable by imprisonment.

Article 113 of the Criminal Code makes this rather clear: “Any public officer or servant who communicates or publishes any document or fact, entrusted or known to him by reason of his office, and which is to be kept secret, or who in any manner facilitates the knowledge thereof, shall, where the act does not constitute a more serious offence, be liable, on conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or to a fine (multa).”

Perhaps the most telling instance in which the above law was routinely (and for the umpteenth time) broken by a high-ranking public officer emerged just this week: namely last Monday, when Edgar Galea Curmi, head of secretariat within the Office of the Prime Minister, candidly admitted in court that he had forwarded private correspondence between a private individual (Joe Said, who publicly criticised PN before the 2008 election) to Where’s Everybody chat show host Lou Bondi. 

Naturally, it comes as no surprise that the independent newspaper which editorially supports the party in government would choose to minimise this aspect of Galea Curmi’s testimony: focusing instead on the irrelevant detail that lawyer Toni Abela – also the Labour Party’s deputy leader – was fined for contempt of court by Magistrate Francesco Depasquale.

And yet, the entire case hinges on the allegation that Galea Curmi had tried to pass on equally sensitive information – about both Said and then Green Party leader Harry Vassallo – to Saviour Balzan, editor of this newspaper, shortly before the 2008 election.

Ironically, Galea Curmi countered these allegations by unwittingly confirming the existence precisely of a direct link between Castille and the press: in this case, a public service journalist whose impartiality is supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution.

And while the government-friendly press chose as a body to ignore this evidence, the implication is as inescapable as it is worrying: not only does the Prime Minister himself see nothing wrong in sharing private data on individual citizens (in this case, concerning a man’s medical records, no less); but his secretary goes on to feed the information to ‘independent’ journalists on State TV, thus reducing both journalist and national station to a little more than an extension of the Nationalist Party’s propaganda machine.

Meanwhile, in a sinister twist to the same theme, Said’s medical case file somehow also found its way into the hands of David Agius – Nationalist Party whip – who just as nonchalantly produced it as evidence in a separate court case in which Agius is suing Said for libel.

Agius has yet to explain how he came into possession of that particular document, which could only have come from either Said himself, or from Mater Dei Hospital. The matter is now being investigated by the Data Protection Commissioner; but for reasons which remain unclear, there has to date been no criminal investigation by the police. 

What Agius’s testimony confirms beyond all reasonable doubt is that the erosion of party/State frontier is not limited only to OPM and other ministries or government departments. State assets such as hospitals and health centres – and all the confidential information these invariably contain – are clearly also subject to illegal transfer of personal information.

Strangely, however, the Institute of Journalists – which recently came out with a ‘code of ethics’ that is arguably more concerned with defending the rights of public drunkards than with anything remotely concerning the press – seems to see absolutely nothing wrong with any of this.

Nor, presumably, does Joe Public... at least, until it is Joe Public’s medical records that get splashed all over In-Nazzjon, on blogs or on programmes by Where’s Everybody… in which case, Joe Public will belatedly discover how Malta’s entire legal regime – from the laws passed by parliament, to law-enforcement agencies, to the law courts and beyond – are more concerned with preserving the current government’s ‘right’ of access to private data, than with protecting citizens’ privacy. How else can one explain how a government-appointed Magistrate can fine a lawyer for contempt of court, but then, not even bat an eyelid when evidence of a crime, involving Malta’s highest-ranking public servants, surfaces in his own courtroom?

Meanwhile, the individual whose rights will have been trampled upon – his medical records exposed to the press, his police files ransacked by political apparatchiks, his email correspondence hacked or financial information sold to the highest bidder – will invariably find him or herself isolated: with the usual army of bloggers and State-approved broadcasters justifying all manner of illegality ‘for the good of the Party’.

It is cold comfort to know that this sort of two-way traffic between political parties and strategic segments of the media is neither new, nor limited only to the PN. Recently, Opposition leader Joseph Muscat also had cause to rue email correspondence with an RTK journalist, which somehow found its way into the PN media – with potentially damaging consequences for both Labour and its leader.

But all this reinforces the overwhelming ‘moral of the story’. Where the interests of political parties are concerned – especially if the party occupies the government benches in Parliament – you will find that individual privacy rights, as well as the laws that supposedly defend them, will be the first casualties of a war that has now lost all sense of proportion or decency.