This government is not completely against spying. It just distinguishes between spies who love it and those who don’t. In fact, information leaks that complement the work of the Department of Information and the Public Broadcasting Services spin an Orwellian version of the truth that seems to be duly rewarded rather than punished. Of course, this would not be the case with any ‘OK siehbi’ (Ok mate) kind of leak.
Former Police Commissioner fined
Former Police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit was recently fined; no, not for serving soup in the wrong bowl. One of Zammit’s subordinates, Inspector Elton Taliana, happened not to ascribe to the Tagħna Lkoll faith. For that he was made the scapegoat for one of the many cock-ups that occurred under Zammit’s watch as Malta’s top cop.
During Zammit’s inspector days in the 1980s, the police did the dirty work in-house. Now they have moved with the times and they are outsourcing. Confidential papers from Taliana’s personal file conveniently ended up in the hands of a government-friendly newspaper, which not only proceeded to shred him to pieces but to brazenly use copies of those papers in court to vilify him further.
Engineered leaks
Zammit may no longer be Police Commissioner (he did cross the line once too often) but he’s still a beneficiary of Labour’s job cornucopia. Unable to ensure the security of a few papers in a file, he was still judged to be up to the job of ensuring the security of heads of government attending CHOGM later on this year, because, by Labour’s yardstick, Zammit did nothing wrong. Indeed, he might have shown how things should be done when government wants to purge the public sector from those who do not subscribe to the faith.
You got a few people in the crosshairs? The place to start is always with a “story” in a rag that’s sufficiently slavish to set the scene for your coup. So GWU paper It-Torċa, in an attempt to shore up its flagging readership, spun a story about “spies” for ex-Minister Tonio Fenech in the public sector. Never one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story or the dictates of its political masters, the paper carried the story of “a leak of confidential and sensitive data”.
You cannot leak what’s already public
What was the “confidential and sensitive data” in question? It turns out to be no more than a reference to the resignation of the Director-General of the National Statistical Office. There was nothing confidential about the resignation because it was already public.
And sensitive? Hands up anyone who doesn’t think that job creation in the last two years wasn’t driven by phantom public sector posts for anyone who lent his face to Labour’s campaign in the last general election. Yet, an article which comes nowhere close to minimal journalistic standards was sufficient for the institutions in question to suspend these people on half-pay or make them take forced leave.
The public official who once helped the Labour Opposition
Let’s draw a comparison, shall we? Not with the many public servants who, despite the supposedly public impartiality of their employer, have plastered their Facebook walls with photos of them sporting flags with blazing torches.
No, I have in mind the case of the Central Bank official who, some years back, was involved in the preparation of the document on the effect of electricity tariffs on the economy for the Labour Party then in Opposition. No partisan paper acted as judge and jury in his case but he faced a disciplinary board which, being independent, was free to reach the verdict of not guilty while cautioning against getting involved in matters of political controversy. That mild reprieve did not stand in the way of the person being appointed the bank’s Deputy Governor when Labour was voted in office.
Information leakages: two weights and two measures
Now in government, Labour wants the head of three people on a plate because they sent a former minister an email with public information but have remained silent on the leaking of personal information, from the office of the Commissioner of Police, on a police officer. Two weights and two measures. The methods might have changed but, sadly, we’ve been here before during a previous stint of Labour in government.
Mr Puli is a Nationalist Party MP and the party’s spokesman for Citizens’ Rights, Civil Rights, Equality, Social Dialogue, Consumers’ Rights, Internet Rights, Communications, Broadcasting and Audio-Visual Policy