As one who had it happen to him twice, I can only sympathise with Joseph Muscat: you do get paranoid when someone hacks your e-mail.

I can only speak with real knowledge about what happened to me. As for the rest, there are enough people around to tell you what it feels like.

The first episode happened years ago when an e-mail Alan Camilleri sent me suddenly appeared elsewhere.

I was not in my office, which was locked as I was out. Yet someone hacked into my e-mail and Alan’s comment to me suddenly became public knowledge.

I had not contacted Alan for anything. He had received an e-mail from a member of my staff and he was reacting, privately, to it in words expressing annoyance and worse.

As I was saying, you get paranoid when something like that happens to you. You start to imagine people hacking your e-mails and possibly your desktop with I don’t know what modern gadgets.

Then you sit back and begin to reason things out.

I remember Mr Camilleri was livid and we were quite shaken because although it could have conceivably been someone from somewhere else, it was more conceivably someone employed by us.

I remember we did try and investigate, and we also got outside experts to help us, but in the end nothing concrete was found, although there were a couple of pointers leading to one or two members of our staff then (they are no longer with us today).

In the end, a saner course of action was suggested and I agreed to change the password on my e-mail account. That is a sane piece of advice and they keep telling us you should change your passwords every so often. An even more sane advice would be to treat e-mails as something semi-public. After all, one never knows who may be hacking your account.

And of course I was nothing like the Leader of the Opposition.

The second episode was rather murkier.

People may remember that one day, after the Sunday edition was closed and I had gone home (but the paper had still to leave our office), I had a call from Joe Mifsud, then Labour’s International Secretary, who point-blank asked me why I had allowed Daphne to write about Dr Sant’s toupee.

To say I was shocked is to minimize what I felt. I felt the walls of the office melting away and anything and everything we were doing was instantly becoming public knowledge, or at least known by the Labour Party. That was in the run-up to the 2008 election.

When I mentioned what happened in public some time later, all hell broke loose. Later on I believe I paid my pound of flesh for making this known, but that’s another story.

Some time later, must be some months later, the same thing happened again. I was still at the office and we had finished putting the Sunday paper together when I received an e-mail, with a fictitious e-mail address, revealing the writer knew at that point in time what was in the following day’s paper.

Again, the paper had not yet been sent to the printers.

The e-mail was signed by someone using the name of an Italian porn star, Rocco Sifredi and this, later on, was to give me a good inkling who it might have been from.

This second episode led us to do some quick checking at that late hour and we reasoned that as it could not have been someone hacking into our internal system, there must have been a loophole. We did some quick checking and found the loophole and plugged it.

Since then, we did not have a recurrence.

Some time later, Dr Mifsud, who continued to protest his innocence regarding this hacking, said he was at a barbecue and someone called and gave him information regarding what Daphne had written. He then thought fit to call me and chide me for running Daphne’s piece.

No Institute of Journalists or similar organisation saw fit to issue a statement condemning this hacking of a fellow journalist. Nor this improper pressure put on a journalist. There may be a specific reason for that. And I am not a member of the institute, anyway.

When Dr Muscat blew a fuse in Parliament last Wednesday because the PN media was running his e-mail correspondence with former RTK journalist Sabrina Agius, at least part of his feelings of outrage must have come from feeling hacked. You feel denuded, impotent, surrounded by people out to get you.

But there are at least two or three other strands to the story.

Apart from the two episodes that directly concern me, there have been innumerable episodes in which the Labour media obtained and used e-mails not made public or sent to it.

Some, as in Paul Borg Olivier’s famous ‘fat finger’ episode, happened because of a mistake on the part of the sender. Even so, however, many e-mails nowadays carry a warning at the bottom so if the e-mail is not addressed to you do not use it, just destroy it.

In other cases, it seems a case of something that looks very much like hacking. There was also the episode, referred to by Fr Joe Borg in his angry blog this week, where an internal communication by the anti-divorce movement was made public, including that by the Labour media, which revelled in revealing the details of the internal relations of that movement in the run-up to the referendum.

Now the boot is on the other foot.

There is the issue of how the PN media got hold of this exchange of e-mails. Some rather technical arguments have been made on how the format of the revealed emails show they were not hacked from Dr Muscat’s side and that they must have been printed on Ms Agius’ side.

It has also been said that a (male) colleague of Ms Agius sat at her desk while she was out and since she had not logged out of her Gmail connection, got to see her past emails and found the entire correspondence.

I worked in that office for 15 years (we had British Army cast-off typewriters then!) and the place was no bed of roses. However, it is rather shocking to have colleagues snooping around on other people’s computers and emails. If Ms Agius has now been sacked, is the other person being considered as a whistleblower or just a sneak? Will he be rewarded or punished?

What has been damaged the most in this episode is the public’s perception of Dr Muscat.

I know Dr Gonzi replies to his e-mails (not that I know it through personal experience, for I have never e-mailed him), but I am sure you will never find Dr Gonzi engaging in the same fraternizing, almost conniving, relations with a journalist.

The e-mails show a Ms Agius throwing herself at Dr Muscat “use me, use me” and proposing to be this and that and anything in between. If what has been published is what was exchanged between them, Dr Muscat was extremely naïve to reply in that manner.

I often find myself referring to Tony Blair’s book. Mr Blair and his Prince of Darkness and Alastair Campbell were more than just interested in the goings-on of the media, but I am sure Mr Blair never spoke, let alone was caught out writing e-mails to journalists in the way Dr Muscat has been portrayed as doing.

There is much in the local media panorama that needs analysis and careful judgement and it is by no means certain that we, or I, are doing all we should be doing. There is much media spin going on by the government network of communications coordinators et al.

But it still jars when the top guy, the Leader of the Opposition, no less, entertains communications with members of the media with such undertones like telling people to hold on to their jobs for they will be useful, or musing about their moving on to another media stable.

The last time I had something like this happen to me was some 40 years ago when we had two bishops who were at war against each other and I was told by an aide of one of them to stick in there ‘for we need you there’. It made me feel used and part of a dirty game.

That is not what the Leader of the Opposition is there for. The alternative Prime Minister should have other things to do.

[email protected]