The secretary general of the Nationalist Party is under great pressure, following the publication of an e-mail which he erroneously sent to his counterpart at the Labour Party. In this e-mail, Dr Paul Borg Olivier writes about a meeting that was held to strengthen the “web of communication” to enable the PN and ministries/parliamentary secretariats to be more effective in its customer care relationship with the people.

It is only natural that the PL has made a big issue out of it. PL leader Joseph Muscat, in a press conference given on Thursday, said that while the party agreed with the name of the person who was suggested by the Prime Minister to be the next Data Protection Commissioner, the first thing the party would do when he or she is appointed will be to ask for an investigation into possible data sharing between the government and the PN.

For his part, Dr Borg Olivier defended himself by denying that there had been any breach of the Data Protection Act, saying that the idea was to have a better customer care mechanism.

It was a rather weak reply from him, especially when he then ended up accusing the PL secretary general, Jason Micallef, of taking advantage, for political purposes, from an e-mail he was not supposed to receive. What did he expect Mr Micallef to do? Delete it and move on? In the political world, that is certainly too much to ask for.

If the roles had been reversed, Dr Borg Olivier would have accused the PL of breaching data protection laws. And, in fact, he is now ready to reveal what he says are documents that show that the Labour Party has a system to collect citizens’ data without their consensus. There you go, the tit-for-tat game has begun.

There are two important elements in the whole scenario – apart from the possibility of data transmission per se, one must also consider the fact that there is supposed to be a demarcation line between what is “the government” and what is “the party”. To have a secretary-general of a political party writing to government ministers and parliamentary secretaries the way Dr Borg Olivier did makes it clear that such a distinction is not so clear.

There is one sentence that sticks out like a sore thumb in the e-mail he sent – “So, as part of the first process to integrate data on an accessible level in the Office of the Prime Minister, every Customer Care office is being asked to pass on data on a template... to include (1) personal data of people who went to (customer care offices) in the past eight months (2) type of query (3) action and (4) result.”

In the first place, what does a party secretary general have to do with the OPM? Is the party and the OPM one and the same thing? And, most of all, why should the party get to know who complained about what? If someone protests, say, about an income tax return why does the party have to get to know about it?

In another part of the e-mail, Dr Borg Olivier calls for “collective synergy... to be more effective... with those who approach the party and ministries/parliamentary secretariats”. While it is Dr Borg Olivier’s duty to see to his party’s needs, what happens in ministries and secretariats should not be his business.

In his press conference, Dr Borg Olivier said that he never asked for any information to be passed on from the government to the party. Such a request may not have been written down black on white, but there is a strong implication that data gathered by the government could be made available to the party.

Dr Borg Olivier is, however, not on his own in this. He is carrying the blame because he was the one who was responsible for writing and sending the e-mail in question, but more people – in the government and in the party – are part of the system.