The government is very clearly not even considering changing its surveillance regime, despite calls from the United Nations, the European Courts and, just this week, the European Parliament.

Such is the government's opposition to relinquishing its Orwellian hold on the way in which it spies on its citizens that its own Members of European Parliament this week voted against a bid to force member states to introduce transparency and better regulation into their surveillance regimes.

All three of Malta's governing party MEPs this week defied their own Socialist and Democrats European parliamentary grouping and voted against a resolution backed foursquare by the S&Ds.

The MEPs certainly would not have gone against their parliamentary grouping, unless it was under instructions from back home to do so.  And this is clearly what happened.

The resolution calls on governments to publish statistics on their requests to private companies for private user information, which the Maltese government flatly refuses to do. It also calls on member states to create a meaningful oversight of intelligence activities, and to cooperate closely with national parliaments to ensure that effective oversight mechanisms are in place including by sharing best practices and common standards.

Malta's 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 is 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.

This situation is anything but tolerable and, thankfully, it is only a matter of time before push comes to shove and the necessary changes are forced upon the Maltese government.

Passports: government take the moral high road

Presented with a near golden opportunity to re-introduce the once hotly contested secrecy clause to its citizenship-for-cash programme, the government this week instead chose to stick to the moral high road.

When the programme had been first pitched back at the end of 2013, one of the main bones of contention had been the government's insistence on not publishing the names of those who had purchased their citizenships.

In so many ways, the notion ran against the grain of the very concept of citizenship of a country, to forming part of one's adoptive community. No amount of money was enough, many had argued, to offset the fact that Malta will have incognito citizens, whose status as actual citizens of this country is known to none but a very select few.

It was also against the spirit of the decades-old practice of periodically publishing the names of those who are granted citizenship.  At the time the government was proposing two lists of new citizens: one list, which would be published, of all those who over the last year were granted Maltese citizenship through normal channels - i.e. through marriage, descent etc... - and another list of those who purchased Maltese citizenship, which would not be published.

But the opposition, Brussels and even some of the programme's staunchest supporters viewed the prospect that the names of those people becoming citizens through the Individual Investment Programme would remain forever shrouded in secrecy as wrong on so many levels that the government backtracked and pledged the publication of the names.

And it did so despite the fact that the secrecy clause was one of the programme's leading marketing enticements.  True, the names are being published - but with a difference. Before the citizenship programme began yielding its first new citizens, the government had always published the list of new citizens alphabetically by surname.  The last time around, which included the first crop of IIP citizens, it published the whole list of all categories of new citizens, as promised, but instead it did so alphabetically by first name.

The obvious ploy was to disguise those who purchased their passports: whole families are rarely given Maltese citizenship in one fell swoop, except for those qualifying under the IIP. 

Just this week the regulator of the citizenship scheme acknowledged that the publication of the names of new citizens was putting off some prospective passport investors, and he suggested a debate on the publication of new citizens' names.   He even suggested the list could be made available on a need to know basis.

The government, however, disagreed and insisted that the publication of the names of new citizens would remain in place exactly as it is. We agree completely.  While the addition of an extra element of secrecy in terms of the names of new citizens would have undoubtedly helped with the sale of passports, the government has considered reversing the secrecy clause as a step too far.