Muscat emails | You’ve got (someone else’s) mail

On Thursday, GWU’s daily newspaper l-orizzont ran a mammoth headline with the words ‘ESPIONAGE ON MUSCAT’ on its front page. And in an equally unwieldy font, PN newspaper In-Nazzjon gave front-page prominence to a story about Muscat’s ‘attempt to control the independent media’.

Neither headline had much to do with the actual implications of the email exchange at the heart of the story. The Nazzjon’s slant was particularly rich, coming from a political party that has constantly attempted to control the independent media for decades. As for the GWU’s concern with ‘espionage’, this only deserves attention if the underlying allegation (i.e., that Muscat’s private email had been ‘hacked’) can actually be substantiated.

Besides: the headlines look at the issue only from the narrow perspective of what the episode meant to the PN and Labour respectively. All other considerations are disregarded: among them, how ‘electronic media’ have now redefined the boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable in political warfare, and in a sense redrawn the battle-lines altogether: providing new opportunities for attack, as well as new and more insidious potential obstacles for unsuspecting politicians to trip up on.

This particular case also illustrates the emergence a new whole underclass of war casualty: the public’s peace of mind.

Privacy in the public domain

The first of several considerations involves the ethical acceptability or otherwise of publishing correspondence that is, to all intents and purposes, ‘private’.

It is a balancing act all media sooner or later have to face; and from a purely ethical perspective, the precise borderline is not exactly easy to define. Even the legal boundary (which one would expect to be a little clearer) is somewhat confused, as it transpires that ordinary legislation governing ‘traditional’ communications systems are not automatically extended to their electronic equivalents.

What is certain, however, is that making news out of private email exchanges (or for that matter, telephone conversations) is hardly a unique phenomenon. Internationally, an entire repertoire of comparable episodes readily springs to mind: starting with the telephone flirtations between the UK’s Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and culminating in last year’s Wikileaks sensation.

Locally, it was only a few months ago that an email exchange between media lecturer Fr Joe Borg and Stock Exchange chairman Arthur Galea Salomone – both heavily involved in the ‘No to Divorce’ campaign at the time – found its way onto the front-page of this newspaper (and ironically, also the GWU-owned It-Torca).

The email in question revealed that Fr Borg had suggested ‘using children from broken homes’ for their propaganda effect in the campaign… while also shedding light on some rather amusing details, such as how Fr Borg had complained that the chosen theme-song was not ‘catchy’ enough for his liking.

When criticised for this apparent invasion of privacy, MaltaToday justified its publication of the email in question by arguing that the story’s public interest value outweighed any concern with individual privacy… especially considering that all the people involved in the exchange were by definition public figures.

To be fair, Fr Borg himself never complained directly about the publication of the email, choosing instead to question the news value of its revelations. It is a line he maintained also in this particular case.

Indeed the comparison holds on at least a superficial level, though it tends to stutter in the details. For instance: no one in his right mind would deny that high profile anti-divorce campaigners are by definition fair game for media attention, especially against the backdrop of a full-blown referendum campaign. But what about individual employees of a Church-owned radio station?

In the absence of any widely accepted definition of ‘public figure’, there are no hard and fast rules. In this particular case, Sabrina Agius had already risen to prominence by becoming the first employee ever to challenge the Church in the Industrial Tribunal… though this detail tells us more about news value associated with the Church, than about Agius’s status as a public figure.

Either way, the Opposition leader’s public role is not exactly up for discussion. Any input Joseph Muscat may have had in this case – be it to intervene in a workplace dispute, or (as the PN implied) to try and ‘plant’ a journalist in a private newspaper – is by definition ‘news’, and would get onto newspapers’ front pages in any country in the world.

Hack attack?

Another consideration involves how the information was acquired in the first place. In turning its nose at the story – which we now know was offered to it on a plate, by the same party that feigns ‘horror’ when the opposition tries to influence independent media – The Times reasoned that it was unsafe to publish information that may have been illegally obtained.

Certainly, Muscat himself believes his private email account had been hacked, and even asked the Speaker of the House to investigate… rather strangely, seeing that the presumed ‘hacking’ did not target his ‘gov.mt’ email account, but rather a personal account over which parliament has no jurisdiction or control.

If true, the allegation would certainly constitute a case of theft, and the publication of the email might qualify as accessory to the crime. But as recent analogous cases have also shown, there is more than one way for ‘private’ emails to become public.

Hacking is certainly a possibility, but in this instance – seeing as we are dealing with a Gmail account on one hand, and a private server on the other – the operation would require more in the way of IT professionalism than would have been involved in (for instance) the allegations involving the mass hacking of hundreds of government email accounts in 2009.

Other possibilities include ‘accidental leakage’ of the kind last seen when PN secretary-general Paul Borg Olivier mistakenly addressed an email to his PL counterpart Jason Micallef, instead of Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi. (The expression ‘doing a PBO’ is still occasionally used to describe this sort of mistake).

It is naturally debatable whether either Sabrina Agius or Joseph Muscat “did a PBO” or not. But it is also improbable, as one or both would have certainly realised the mistake afterwards.

An arguably likelier possibility involves third parties accessing Agius’s work email directly from her unattended terminal… in which case the email could very easily have been forwarded to any number of recipients, without any ‘hacking’ at all.

There is much to be said for this action itself, from both an ethical and legal perspective. But from the point of view of the newspaper editor in whose inbox the emails eventually land, all such considerations are rendered almost instantly obsolete by the disclosure’s undeniable news value... and if it is a politically owned or motivated news outlet, there is also the propensity for political spin.

The dark side of spin

It is this latter detail that marks a stumbling block in Malta, where ‘news value’ often depends less on public interest, than on the exigencies of one political party against those of another. This case is hardly an exception, and the story only fully makes sense when viewed against the backdrop of a series of other media-related developments, all of which have illustrated a darker side to the government’s spin machine.

For one thing, the timing of the story itself (coupled with the particular slant applied by the Nazzjon and its media allies) strongly suggests a conscious reaction to revelations concerning the PN’s near total dominance of public broadcasting, which have sporadically emerged over the past few weeks.

These started with a revised PBS schedule, that expanded Bondiplus onto two days a week… among other initiatives to seal off the national broadcaster to less overtly government-friendly views.

More recently still, it was revealed that Where’s Everybody? presenter Peppi Azzopardi had ‘coached’ Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando ahead of his seminal clash with Alfred Sant before the 2008 election – an election that the PN went on to win, in large part thanks to Pullicino Orlando’s performance in that encounter.

The implications were little short of staggering, and culminated in an explosive television clash last Monday between Pullicino Orlando, Peppi Azzopardi, Joe and Godfrey Grima, and PBS CEO Anton Attard– centering mainly on the PN’s ‘attempts to control the independent (and/or national) media.’

It is almost impossible not to see a parallel between the actions with which the PN stands accused, and its own accusations vis-à-vis Joseph Muscat on the front page of In-Nazzjon.

Clearly, the Sabrina Agius email provided a welcome opportunity for a counter attack, which in turn serves two important strategic goals: the first, to deflect public attention from the media scrum which had proved so damaging to the credentials of its own journalists ‘embedded’ in PBS and elsewhere; the second, to send out a subliminal message to all those independent journalists who might consider not playing the game to their particular rules. On both counts, the strategy can be seen to have been singularly successful. But inevitably, there is a price to pay.

Most likely, the ‘investigation’ into Muscat’s hacking claims will end up going nowhere… if nothing else, because the allegations themselves are so flimsy and unsupported by anything other than vague suspicion. 

But ‘suspicion’ is precisely what the above-mentioned strategy has succeeded in inducing throughout the country – thus reinforcing the view of political parties as unscrupulous machines that will stop at nothing to achieve their aims, no matter how many ordinary victims are ruthlessly crushed in the process. 

Given the fate befallen in this case by one ordinary citizen who occupied little or no public position at all, other ordinary citizens would be entirely justified in suspecting that their own right to privacy – their emails, their online comments, their Facebook profiles, etc, etc. – will be similarly ransacked and exploited for political effect, so long as there is anything to be gained by one party or the other.

And while this may always have been the case, the greater ease and availability of communication in this internet age has also created greater opportunities for online exploitation.

In a sense, the Sabrina Agius scenario serves as a warning to us all.