The Opposition should be very careful about which bandwagons it jumps on, as amply evidenced by this week’s government ‘hacking’ debacle.

The media this week reported on the latest WikiLeaks cache of documents, and this time the victim was the Italian company Hacking Team. The company had some one million of its emails hacked and distributed via WikiLeaks.

Hacking Team has long been a source of controversy because the company sells surveillance tools to law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, and of course among them are repressive regimes that use the tools to spy on human rights activists and political dissidents.

The emails showed that Malta Security Services officials met the company’s representatives at a European intelligence and law enforcement conference in Prague last month, where the company’s software was pitched to Malta’s secret service by the company’s sales team. 

Interest was naturally expressed in a demonstration of the technology, quotes were given and the company’s officials said in the emails that the prospective Maltese clients “seemed interested”.  Further emails were exchanged in which the sales pitch and further discussions about a demonstration were discussed, and it stopped there.

Just to put things into better perspective, Maltese officials were pitched software at a convention, emails were exchanged and nothing ever came of it. This could have happened at any kind of industry conference, and it happens all the time. The government later confirmed that nothing ever came of the short-lived sales pitch.

According to the government, the company’s local representative offered its services to the security services ‎ but the equipment purchased by the previous administration was deemed to still be in perfectly good working order.

And that is exactly the point: Malta does not need any ‘hacking’ solutions, it already has one with which the security service has the capability to access mobile and land line traffic, as well as all internet communications, internet browser traffic and emails included. As such, there is no new and ominous threat to citizens’ privacy – that threat was already, and still is, present.

Is it possible that the Opposition, under a new administration, is not aware of the simple fact that what the company in question was doing was attempting to sell the government a new communications interception solution to replace the one currently in use?

Does the Opposition not recall the clamour that had resulted when the last administration purchased its surveillance and interception system from the controversial Israeli company Verint Systems?

But despite that, the Opposition issued an immediate knee-jerk reaction to the news that an offer for a new, similar system had been pitched. In a statement, the Opposition expressed “its grave concern at the news that the government is seeking to purchase hacking technology that enables it to spy on citizens’ private emails and internet activity. This is not what the people were promised. People do not want a big brother government that spies on them. And the Opposition will give a voice to people’s concerns”.

But the overriding question here is not about who did and who did not procure surveillance equipment because, after all, these are necessary tools that no government’s intelligence agencies can do without. The question is about how those powers are used and what oversight the system has been given.

And here the current government has simply taken over the past practices instituted by its predecessors.

The Security Service Act was drafted into law by a Nationalist Party administration back in 1996, and the powers vested in the security services to undertake surveillance have remained in place unchanged until the present day.

And in fact, in these 19-odd years since the legislation governing Malta Security Service was drafted there has only been one amendment, and that concerned the appointment and the role of the head of the Security Service.

It is a situation in which a government can eavesdrop on all private citizens’ private communications without proper oversight or the right kinds of checks and balances having been set in place.

The public at large, and it seems the Opposition too, has been pretty much in the dark when it comes to the powers the state has to eavesdrop, or intercept, citizens’ private phone calls, emails and internet activity.

The problem is that Malta is one of the few industrialised countries that has no judicial oversight when it comes to the tapping of phones, internet, email or any other kind of communication. To engage in such practices, there is no need for a judicial warrant, only a warrant from the minister responsible for Malta Security Services or the Prime Minster himself.

Nor is there any proper independent or judicial oversight at the time of the commission of the warrant or after the fact, or indeed any other kind of reasonable oversight of day-to-day communication tapping activities.

Nor is there any way of quantifying at least the raw numbers of the interceptions enacted since Maltese law, unlike the laws in other countries, makes the disclosure of any aspect of how interception is conducted illegal.

This state of affairs is shared by only a handful of other countries. Like Malta, the disclosure of any data related to telephony interceptions is also prohibited in Turkey, Qatar, South Africa, India, Egypt, and Albania. In the EU, such disclosures are prohibited in Hungary and Romania.

Given the situation, one really has no idea how much, or, for that matter, how little, the Maltese public is being snooped upon by its own government. This certainly does not mean that the Maltese population is being spied on en masse – it only means that no one really has any idea of the extent of the practice. 

As matters stand, the phone and internet tapping modus operandi is a completely closed system in the hands of the minister and the minister alone, barring intervention by the Prime Minister. We are not saying that there is abuse in the system but, theoretically, if there is abuse no one would be any the wiser. All we have is the government’s word for it and, unfortunately, that is not enough with any government the world over.

If the government is interested in going one up on the Opposition in the surveillance stakes, it should radically reshape the legislation governing the murky area and legislate for the right kind of oversight and checks and balances that befits a modern, Western democracy.