j'accuse

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.