Anglu Farrugia will cry crocodile tears at the Labour Party General Council. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando will resort to reporting “evil bloggers” on his Facebook wall. Franco Debono will include a new law regulating evil attacks in his program of legislation (which program, having its hours counted, threatens to be the largest amount of laws proposed in the shortest time). General appeals and not-so-subtle implications will be made that the PM should do something about the bloggers and columnists who are resorting to “personal attacks”. And we all get carried away.

Your average listener or reader will not hesitate to chime in with the scarcely researched tautology of “Yes, there should be some form of decency, we have gone too far”. But have we? Or rather – what kind of legislation and control are these paladins of democracy seeking? While the general public showed the predictable kind of ambivalence when the laws dubbed as the New Censorship laws were published the sweeping statements about controlling other fields of expression than the arts multiplied.

First. A note about the new laws. They have nothing to do with such issues as libel and slander. What we have there is a new system of rating theatre and cinema that includes an element of self-discipline. This approach is highly commendable from a libertarian point of view because it emphasises (and exalts) the individual capacity to take responsible decisions. The theatre producer is invited to “censor” his own piece before any official scissors come into play. Self-control, self-censorship – an ability to assess what is and what is not acceptable in wider society : that is the heritage of an intelligent, emancipated and responsible society. Are we ready for the show?

Well, insofar as the political arena is concerned it looks like it is going to be tough. I am of the opinion that the current laws (if we DO have to look at legislation rather than policy first) are more than enough. It is a combination of publish (responsibly) and be damned. Defence in libel includes the “exceptio veritatis” (exception of truth) – the defence that is based on the idea that whatever was said about someone can be seen to be the truth. This is sometimes the reason why somebody who claims to have been libelled fails to go to court for fear of the “libel” being proven to have been the truth.

The “exceptio veritatis” is also itself controlled. While proving that a statement that is being scrutinised for libel or slander might stand strong if it is proved to be true, the truth is not a useful defence in the case of invasion of privacy. Stating that a Minister hosted a party with drugs freely available is defensible with the truth exception – i.e. if the fact is proven to be true. Saying that a Minister has the backside the side of a lorry it is an invasion of privacy and the mere fact that it is true (though even there – the exaggerated hyperbole is such that even the truth is obviously non-existent) will not suffice as a defence.

The fact of the matter is that libel, slander and defamation laws when applied constitute a solid last resort in the battlefield. On the other hand calling for more regulation is a perverse counter-productive move that demonstrates an ignorance of the law and, sadly, an intent to revert to the times of “Indħil Barrani” when our laws were tailor made to serve the interests of whoever needed to gag uncomfortable elements.

Check out again the Newt Gingrich video (top right) starting from 2’20″. Gingrich is asked a very uncomfortable question during a prime primary debate. It is an issue that is very private and Gingrich’s reaction says it all. “I would not like to answer it but I will”. Gingrich goes on to tackle the method of questioning and shoots some repartees of his own towards the press that has peddled the story. There and then. No courts. No gagging orders. Pure and simple intelligent response. And then the question is left to the voters to judge and value. Will voters give more importance to the story of Newt wanting an open relationship or to the fact that Newt was considered enough of a heavyweight to warrant a relentless barrage of mediatic coverage of the fact?

Which brings me to the question of politicians and privacy. Unfortunately the risk of reneging on most of what is private in their lives is a risk that politicians (and footballers, and actors, and prominent businessmen) take in a calculated manner more and more. When campaigns are built on family values and when consorts and children are used in campaigns to be paraded as some form of assets to the main storyline then we should not be surprised that the vultures in the press will be probing to examine whether this too is a facade. When you commit errors during a campaign and these are highlighted, parodied and caricaturised you’d be stupid to claim that these are personal attacks.

Our democracy does not need gagging orders and stricter regulation. Our democracy needs intelligent citizens and … if it is not asking for too much … intelligent politicians.

Stop “personal attacks”. That was PM Gonzi’s appeal to the nation. “Appeal” is a keyword there. It says a lot about “oligarchies” and “power”. The newly announced censorship provisions (that incidentally deal with a fraction of what we refer to as censorship and expression in daily parlance) are not even law yet but many jumped the gun drawing conclusions between the PM’s appeal and the new laws.

So. Last night I watched “The Devil’s Double” a movie based on the true story of the real-life double of Uday Saddam Hussein. There was Uday, son of the Iraqi dictator lording it all over  Baghdad. He did what he liked and that included driving up to school gates and picking up 14 year old girls to take home and rape. In Hussein’s Iraq the only rule was “do not mess with the Hussein family” or they will mess you up.  It was not funny. In essence if Uday did not like you he turned into the horrible nightmare of Ahmed the Dead Terrorist – without the laughs. “Silence…I keel you”.

And Gonzi “appeals” to the nation. To everybody. For he cannot do more than that. He should not be able to. I cannot fathom what supposedly intelligent beings like Saviour Balzan could mean when they come up with the legal lie that Lawrence Gonzi has some power to shut people up. And by people I mean the obvious targets like Daphne Caruana Galizia. What rubbish. What delusional stupidity. I’ll have more to say and to explain as to why all this is rubbish later. Meanwhile I will ask you to watch the video that is in the top corner of this post (right). Forward it to 2’20″ and watch the exchange between the debate host and Republican Primaries Candidate Newt Gingrich. J’accuse will comment on this later in the day and explain what it has to do with much of what is happening in our wider political-media circles.

For reference here is Saviour Balzan’s latest rant:

The abysmal levels to which we have descended insofar as the language of Shakespeare is concerned provide much food for thought about our nation. It’s not just pronunciation in the manner of a Maltese Arsenal fan during an impromptu interview outside the Emirates Stadium. It’s not a flustered Miss Malta doing her best to sound like a woman of the world who juggles between sushi lessons and saving the Japanese nation from the tsunami aftermath. It’s a general “alazobbizmu” that has taken over when it comes to stringing a few words in English. The cult of “u ijja fhimtni” (bah… so long as you understood) has long overtaken the “chip on the shoulder” reply of “I’m Maltese and not born in London” which is also an enigmatic reply.

The UK might have started the slow and painful separation process from the EU project. English as it is spake in the outlying lands of Europa is in for a jolly funny ride. Here is Mario J Spiteri commenting on Bocca’s column and providing us with more than one candidate for funny t-shirt slogans.

 Mario J Spiteri

Today, 15:31
Oh Dr. ABC, like PN had done last week at their HQ. Shame on you dear with all respect, you should be sorry for insult the intelligence with your contribution. YES if you want to hide that now we are the same when PN was, one cannot show that he/she is Labourite. We are not a totalitary state. Well you’re showing properly that we are like dictatorate state with the peaceful angels (devils dressed in angels vest)

Bumper sticker 1: SHAME ON YOU DEAR WITH ALL RESPECT

Bumper sticker 2: SORRY FOR INSULT THE INTELLIGENCE

Bumper sticker 3: WE ARE THE SAME WHEN PN WAS

Bumper sticker 4: WE ARE NOT A TOTALITARY STATE

Bumper sticker 5: YOU’RE SHOWING PROPERLY

Bumper sticker 6: WE ARE LIKE DICTATORATE STATE WITH THE PEACEFUL ANGELS

Tad-daqqiet ta’ ħarta! and Ma jistħux min Alla li ħalaqhom!

These are the expressions that first come to mind within the first two minutes of watching this Labour oriented production (see “Inkontri” clip below). Sure, we have seen a tacky revival of “Tal-Barrani” and “Raymond Caruana” nostalgia from the PN corner of our dumbass political duopoly. I say tacky because although I can understand the argument that “It’s about what has never been said” the result of this PN propoganda campaign is both divisive and alienating. It’s the latest effort at demonisation of all things Labour Past following the infamous “Taste” and “Zokk u Fergħa” campains that risked torpedoing PN’s last campaigns.

Had the PN been left to their own devices then I really believe that this whole “let’s remind the people what it was like to live under Labour 30 years ago” business would have backfired. We would have thought that people did not need reminding. We would have thought that bringing up these matters now would only be a callous attempt at cheap scare-mongering best practised on second-rate blogs. We would have been wrong.

It seems that the people do need reminding. They need reminding because you actually get seemingly intelligent individuals asking “What’s wrong about the eighties?” or shooting off about what a great time the eighties were. For Wham, Duran Duran and Sam Fox maybe. But not for most of us. Hell, I might not have been at Zejtun or sitting at a table with Raymond Caruana but something tells me that going to “school” in your best mate’s garage is not exactly Normality Inc and to people from my generation that is what the eighties was about.

So Labour saw the campaign and did not like it. So they had to come up with their own version of suffering. It’s a bit like the Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch  - only none of the sides are joking. So you think life under Labour was bad? Let “Inkontri” tell you how bad life under Eddie was then…. And here it is a video that made me want to fast forward to the next election and stick a huge number one next to whatever PN candidate is lucky enough to be first on the blue list.

This is not revisionism – revisionism involves twisting the truth.

This is a lie.  A blatant lie.

All of it.

See for yourself and tell me whether you too get that “ Tad-daqqiet ta’ ħarta! and Ma jistħux min Alla li ħalaqhom!” feeling.

Inkontri

Barrani

Monty Python

Saviour Balzan is anything but an investigative journalist. His agenda-driven interviews make that other paragon of “journalism above everything” pale in comparison. Saviour “interviews” but he is not interested in listening to his interlocutor in order to build on the next question. He’s busy labelling and selling stereotypes that fit into his idea of the universe. Watch him falter and stutter through this interview (start at 3.38 minutes 5 minute mark – skip the ads) as he hopelessly attempts to trap Mike Briguglio (chapeau) into making Labour sound like a reasonable option.

You might want to keep your kids away from the screens – especially at the point where Balzan asks Briguglio whether he feels comfortable “using the Greece and Italy” arguments when speaking about the economy.

I pity Mike Briguglio. I pity him because he was probably dying to push that table out of the way and jump up and yell in Saviour Balzan’s face the words “Wake Up” in RATM style. It’s a pity that Mike has a set of standards he has to adhere to as the head of a party that has no listeners (let alone voters) but that still aspires to a modicum of decency as well as reasonable politics.

Yep. Mike has standards.

Which is definitely not something you can say about Salvu Balzan.

This post is dedicated to ADpfff.

In a previous life when Ghaddafi was still alive and celebrating his 40th anniversary…. fast forward to around 5 minutes 24 seconds… and see the bit about our President….There was “one Western Leader. Like Mugabe and the others were there but there was ONE Western Leader”…. (Don’t worry… it’s already doing the rounds on FB)

It risked becoming old news until Sabrina Agius asked the police to investigate the possibility of computer misuse (and yes, the Times is at it again so we know it is lawyers Emmanuel Mallia and Arthur Azzopardi who are representing Miss Agius – like that is of any public interest at all). SabrinaGate is still the fashion and tonight’s appearance of Joseph Muscat on an interestingly scripted Bondi+ will continue to fan the flames of discussion.

I watched the recording of Bondi+ programme after having watched the much more interesting happenings at the Juventus Stadium. Following the successful conclusion of the match, my host – who happens to be one of the key figures of the saga switched to the recording of Bondi’s latest attempt at investigative journalism. It was an interesting set up of a program based on the general idea of “your wrongs should make this right” – BWSC, Censu Galea and other instances of leaks being used to draw Joseph’s attention to the general sense of “Cosi Fan Tutti” that probably really does pervade our journalistic estate.

Having stomached Bondi’s rehash of the BBCNEWS get-up and colours I turned to discussing the matter with my host – you will by now have guessed that it was my cousin Nathaniel a.k.a. Mr Attard head of Net News. Nathaniel and I manage to disagree on a hundred different matters while remaining generally civil towards each other at the end of every conversation (luckily we agree on matters that count like supporting the black and whites till death do us part). This was not to be one conversation without a disagreement. My biggest issue was with the PN/NET spin or slant that seems to imply that Joseph Muscat is actively planting journalists in the so-called “independent media”.

Joseph Muscat is to planting as Chlorofluorocarbons are to a better climate.  I’ve been wanting to write this third part of the Hack the Dog series for quite some time now and here it is : what does the content teach us? It shows us that  Joseph Muscat is lacking (to put it mildly) in the wise department. Tonight on Bondiplus he tried to pull it off as a sense of decency – “il-Labur ma jindahalx fuq x’jaghmlu gurnalisti”. Rubbish. He had a fawning acolyte who corresponded with him in swooning terms and making herself fully available to his needs. “Uzani kif trid” – the phrase is self-explanatory in all its pornographic lack of subtlety.

Joseph did not actively seek out plants in other media. This correspondence shows a potential plant falling out of thin air and Joseph acts ever so weakly throughout the conversation. It is evident that he loves the attention, he plays along with the considerations of power made by the openly ambitious journalist who shifts from being an “inside hack” to “potential cabinet material” within a few emails. It’s embarrassing in that sense. Not in the sense of the plant – or to put it less directly in the sense of the attempt to establish a line of communication within “enemy lines”. Plants or semi-plants or “lines of communication” are constantly being built or destroyed on either side of the political fence and anyone in the game who denies it must be a very bad liar.

No. It is embarrassing because a Prime Minister to be seems to communicate in the same manner as a teenager playing some strategy video game. I can understand Joseph Muscat’s sense of panic when he hooked on to the fact that his private power flirtations (nothing sexual – we don’t really care about that anyway) would soon be there for all to see. He had to build a bigger more sensational bit of news that would hopefully make the monster go away – hence the hacking and spying bull.

Is the content in the public interest? Well. It’s neither here nor there. Maybe, just maybe this nation is pathetic enough not to know the truth about the dealings and power games played out by our journalistic and political castes. Then it would be in the public interest to publish the correspondence to make people aware of what considerations go on behind the scenes.

We now have the news that Sabrina Agius has gone off to opportune the police with the idea of computer misuse. Here’s my hunch – and I am prepared to swear the following on oath (and it has nothing to do with my being related to a party to the case) – the police will have considerable difficulty in finding out who violated the actual provision of the criminal code relating to computer misuse. Without the original crime of computer misuse (and hence without the virtual “theft”) there can be no questions relating to the handling of information that is not proven to have been unlawfully obtained in the first place. Remember the onus probandi.

Then again, even if there IS finally a culprit to be found the next step – what has been described as handling of stolen goods in a virtual sense is a bit more difficult to prove. Why? Because the “content” of an “email” is not defined at any point in the law. This is not copyright or plagiarism. What exactly are the stolen goods received? In the case of computer misuse the crime is the misuse of the computer and accessing of accounts. The crime might extend to the downloading of data. But does our criminal code, or any other law for that matters, cover the handling of such data once it is put into circulation?

To conclude my hunch is that there is a dangerous lacuna in our law that might point to glaring inconsistencies when defending the right to privacy. I don’t really think that Joseph Muscat is worried about that right now though. I think he is worried that he is being made to look like a totally incompetent dork by the leaked content of his correspondence. And even in today’s modern world… it might turn out to be rather useless to shoot the messenger.

It’s a Maltese expression. “Ġabuħ qisu l-aċċjomu” which literally means “they beat him till he looked like the ‘Ecce Homo’”. “Ecce homo” is a stage in the passion of Christ where Pontius Pilate presents the post-flagellated Christ to the people and states “Here is the man” (Ecce Homo). Religiously speaking it’s a powerful mystical moment that overstates the human aspect of the son of God. Ceasar’s representative has taken the messiah’s humanity to the extreme – and the ugly scene of a butchered Christ is proof that “verbum dei caro factum est”.

I was reminded of the powerful biblical scenes of the passion of Christ in a very weird way yesterday while watching RAIUNO’s late night programme “Porta a Porta”. There was a recurrent image of a dead Gaddafi that I couldn’t help comparing with pictures of the flagellated Christ or of the Turin Shroud.

Meanwhile in the studio the Italian panel wouldn’t stop reminding viewers how badly the Libyan Revolution ended. In their opinion “a tyranny should not be ended with tyrannical acts” or better “this was no civilised way to end a revolution”. I couldn’t help but wonder whether these were the sons of the same nation that conducted the very civilised and public execution of Benito Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci.

The truth is that the pent up anger of a people in such situations will often lead to violent deaths. Gaddafi had denied his people much more than the right to a fair trial and democratic representation. He had trampled on their dignity and used a whole nation as his playground. Only a few months ago he was ordering his own airforce to bombard his own people. While you cannot condone acts of violence nor encourage them I cannot find it in myself to hypocritically condemn the automatic reaction even of a lone man with a pistol when he comes face to face with a dictator.

In the end we are left with the picture of Gaddafi’s bloodied face that ironically reminds us of the “Ecce Homo”. That’s where the similarity ends though.

One died for our sins, the other is belatedly paying for his.

(the Hack the Dog series will resume in the next post)

Houston we have hackgate. We’d only just gotten used to the idea that the Where’s Everybody stables were engaged with the nationalist party in the provision of coaching services for politicians that we know have Joseph Muscat yelling “foul” about the possibility of espionage, hacking and other Big Brother activity. Muscat has got his balls in a twist because an email correspondence between a fawning journalist named Sabrina Agius and his divine self was transferred Assange-style into the public domain. The providers of this very local Wikileak were NET TV in the persona of their head of news Nathaniel Attard. [J'accuse disclaimer - I feel obliged to inform readers that the aforementioned Nathaniel Attard is my first cousin, not that this will in any way impair my judgement of the facts before us].

Anyways this latest episode of PLPN interaction with the fourth estate provides the perfect background for a series of posts that we will be calling Hack the Dog in homage to the movie “Wag the Dog” – a movie about a Washington spin doctor whose title was in turn inspired by the English expression “the tail wagging the dog”. Courtesy of Wikipedia here are the opening lines to the movie:

Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

 

Here are the points I intend to discuss in the next few posts:

1) Possession: In which we list the different scenarios that could lead to a third party coming into possession of private correspondence and examine the legality or illegality of each situation.

2) Content: In which Sabrina’s entreaties to Joseph Muscat are examined in the wider context of political “plants” and the non-partisan media.

3) The Fourth Estate : In which J’accuse returns to “the Big Yawn” and applies the theory of the PLPN soporific to the current fuss that surrounds the recent “discovery” that most of the fourth estate is groomed and fed by the two political parties.

Stay tuned for the next update.

The email correspondence between Sabrina Agius and Joseph Muscat occurred between a g-mail account (Sabrina’s) and a private email account on josephmuscat.com (Joseph’s). At no point is there any correspondence from a work email address (rtk.com.mt). The most we can assume is that Sabrina accessed her gmail account during work hours using an internet connection on her workdesk at RTK’s offices and presumably via RTK’s servers. The Angela Lansbury of Maltese investigative journalism has applied a J’accuse favourite in order to reach an interesting but erroneous conclusion with regard to this correspondence:

No, it’s obvious what happened here. Occam’s Razor, remember. Organisations like the political parties and radio stations have their own internal server and don’t use an external service. The organisation or company bosses have full access to and control over anything passing through that server, because it is done on company time.

If Sabrina Agius sent and received her emails while at the office, they would have been recorded and retained by the office server. That would explain why there are apparent gaps in the information. Those would be the emails she sent and received while at home.

The second bit is obvious too, the way I see it. RTK never bothered to check through the server records to see what kinds of emails its employees sent out. But when Sabrina Agius decided to take legal action against them for not promoting her to editor, they did the first thing an employer does in these cases when preparing their case: go through her emails.

And some of those emails were made public, whether intentionally or not. Good luck to them. Most people would have done the same, faced with such contentious information about an employee making a very public case against them and talking about political discrimination. (the Runs – Mummy, they hacked me)

The impression given here is that it is normal for employers to have full access to and control over anything passing through their server. It’s not. Legally it is not. Let’s start with the recording bit. There are laws that prevent RTK from doing just that. In order to actually access the emails themselves, RTK would require the consent of the user. In certain cases, even attempting to enter an email account that is not your own is a crime – let alone actually using your facilities to open the emails. Technically RTK COULD use a device that allows “packet capture” that is the network equivalent of a phone tap but (and there is one hell of a but) it cannot do so without the consent of the employees. Consent is in fact crucial to both Data Protection law and the criminal law (here’s a hint – the Computer Misuse section of our Criminal Code).

I will not even go into the fact that the 14 page pdf containing the correspondence is very evidently a printout from a GMAIL account – not some garbled text retrieved from a server in the fashion of NCIS/CSI/Murder She Wrote Occam’s Razor fantasy. The signs seem to point more directly to someone accessing the gmail account either by obtaining Sabrina’s password and using it without her consent (see that ugly C word again) or by someone accessing her workdesk while she was away from the PC and without her knowledge (again lack of consent).

To put it simply. There is NO LEGAL WAY for RTK to have got its hands on this correspondence bar Joseph Muscat and Sabrina Agius expressly consenting to their having this information. As to the court case involving RTK and Sabrina… at most you might expect a motivated request by RTK for the court to consent a search of Sabrina’s accounts – and I doubt that a court may acquiesce to such a request simply on the basis of alleged collusion with a politician. (More about the ethics of the content in the next post).

If we eliminate RTK from the equation that leaves two possible other avenues. The first – a leak on Joseph’s side would still mean somebody accessing his account without express permission. Still illegal. Still a crime. Which leaves us with hacking. Personally, and I must say this on a hunch, I find the whole hacking business implausible -especially (and here I agree with the Angela Lansbury assessment) because I am quite sure a hacker would have found much better things to feast on.

CONCLUSION

While the nationalist media will definitely try to concentrate on the stinking content of the exchange there is no doubt that the issue of  the correspondence and how it ended up in the hands of NET TV’s news team is an important issue of itself. We cannot think of a “legal” way for this to happen particularly since it is evident that the legality must perforce involve consent of one of the two parties who are the victims of this hack/leak. Concerns about the ability of one or other political party to circumvent laws designed to protect our privacy are legitimate.

Hackgate’s first baby: Your right to conduct private conversations has been placed in manifest jeopardy. 

Note:

I am aware of the fact that I promised “a legal analysis” but only delivered legal conclusions. I had second thoughts about feeding the wannabe lawyers with the facts. feel free to look up the Data Protection Act, the Criminal Code (Computer Misuse), and subsidiary legislation. Also have a good look at the IDPC website.