Hack the Dog 1 – Intro
Houston we have hackgate. We’d only just gotten used to the idea that the Where’s Everybody stables were engaged with the nationalist party in the provision of coaching services for politicians that we know have Joseph Muscat yelling “foul” about the possibility of espionage, hacking and other Big Brother activity. Muscat has got his balls in a twist because an email correspondence between a fawning journalist named Sabrina Agius and his divine self was transferred Assange-style into the public domain. The providers of this very local Wikileak were NET TV in the persona of their head of news Nathaniel Attard. [J’accuse disclaimer – I feel obliged to inform readers that the aforementioned Nathaniel Attard is my first cousin, not that this will in any way impair my judgement of the facts before us].
Anyways this latest episode of PLPN interaction with the fourth estate provides the perfect background for a series of posts that we will be calling Hack the Dog in homage to the movie “Wag the Dog” – a movie about a Washington spin doctor whose title was in turn inspired by the English expression “the tail wagging the dog”. Courtesy of Wikipedia here are the opening lines to the movie:
Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because the dog is smarter than the tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.
Here are the points I intend to discuss in the next few posts:
1) Possession: In which we list the different scenarios that could lead to a third party coming into possession of private correspondence and examine the legality or illegality of each situation.
2) Content: In which Sabrina’s entreaties to Joseph Muscat are examined in the wider context of political “plants” and the non-partisan media.
3) The Fourth Estate : In which J’accuse returns to “the Big Yawn” and applies the theory of the PLPN soporific to the current fuss that surrounds the recent “discovery” that most of the fourth estate is groomed and fed by the two political parties.
Stay tuned for the next update.
I admire your tentative subjective way of trying to analyse episodes. At least you try to be as subjective as possible unlike some so called “bloggers”. It would be also interesting to compare the way the police will tackle this leak to the way they investigated the filming of Joseph Mizzi
drunkerhhmm sorry drugged at Eurovision. Was it legal or not to film him ? Was it legal to leak private information or not ? In my opinion Nathaniel did nothing illegal. Whether it was ethical or not is another matter. If they handed me such an information hell and how I would publish them. (But I’m no journalist, so I can only pass them on. Is that legal to pass on private information?) Many legal/ethical issues insomma.Cheers Ian,
I’m not sure whether you mean objective rather than subjective. In any case what I tried to do with regards to the legality is look at the issue with whatever facts have transpired from the media.
I am not 100% sure about how the information was obtained in the first place and I am also not 100% sure whether the content itself is entirely in the public interest. What is interesting is that we have do not have a law regulating hacking (whether or not this WAS hacking) on the same lines as the RIPA Act in the UK and more importantly this kind of occurrence highlights the lack of self-regulation among the press. What guidelines do the press have about handling such information? Is there a set of standards – even if it stops at ethics and does not amount to enforceable rules – that can be applied?
Oops so sorry I meant objective… still sleepy this morning and on pun intended.
I’m not 100% sure of anything either. With a little bit of certainty I can say that the emails were printed through Sabrina’s Gmail account.
I’m not even 100% sure if the contents of the email were tempered with or not.
We cannot even be sure if she sent the emails from her work PC or her mobile. The fact that she sent them during work hours doesn’t automatically mean that she used the work PC to send the emails. Push email is available on all smart phones for a number of years.
Whether it’s of public interest or not is subjective. (Got it right this time I hope ;) )
my take:
http://andrewazzopardi.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/sabrina-agius-e-mails-and-aspirations/
Very poor “take” Andrew Azzopardi. Sabrina Agius’ photo on your “take” is larger than your “take”.