Labour wants Mitts inquiry that goes back years

Labour Leader Joseph Muscat yesterday insisted on a broad-sweeping inquiry that scrutinises the operations of the government's IT company Mitts for the past years, stressing that the breach it has sustained is "scandalous".

Dr Muscat dedicated most of his speech at a party activity in Balzan yesterday to the recent revelation that user names and passwords belonging to some 20,000 users of the government IT system had been copied by hackers. The only break came when he turned to the government's proposals to raise utility bills.

Dr Muscat compared the breach with the massive loss of personal data the UK sustained in 2007 when the revenue and customs department lost computer disks containing confidential details of 25 million child benefit recipients.

The incident triggered revelations of a number of other data losses by British government institutions.

"That case led to a whole shake-up," Dr Muscat said. "But here, it's as if nothing has happened."

The attack, suspected to have been made through the system at Malta's Embassy in Cairo, was confirmed by IT Minister Austin Gatt in Parliament last Wednesday, about a month after the news first broke that the police were investigating a possible breach of the Mitts system.

Dr Muscat latched onto the way the government communicated the matter, stressing that it took it two weeks to even acknowledge the problem - at first the government believed the passwords and usernames were unlikely to have been stolen.

He insisted that a breach of these proportions, in which the e-mail access details of MPs and the judiciary were stolen, warrants a root-and-branch inquiry into the operations of the IT company, especially as the minister could not guarantee that similar hacking had not taken place in the past.

"We want an inquiry about all that has taken place in Mitts, not just in September but also in the past, especially since the minister could not guarantee that personal details were not hacked in the past," Dr Muscat said.

He also commented about the Minister's statement that the hacking was likely to have been done by amateurs, saying: "If it was done by amateurs with software downloaded free from the internet, imagine if it had been professionals".

Dr Muscat compared the government's "laissez faire" attitude on the Mitts breach with the approach being taken on the utility bills' proposals. He said that in the present international turmoil the country needs a stimulus package not shocks like the proposed utility bill hikes.

The point had been amplified earlier by Labour tourism shadow minister Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, who highlighted that the government was being irresponsible coming up with this proposal now.

In fact, commenting on the news that the finance minister may be preparing a revised package, Dr Coleiro Preca said the move was a predictable PR stunt which has been performed countless times in the past.

"First they gave everyone the fright of their lives, now they'll come with a reduced package and expect everyone to thank them," she said, stressing that especially in the current international scenario, the move was irresponsible.

Today, Dr Muscat said, the party will be coming up with its own analysis of the government's proposals and will show that the proposed bills would increase rates by €5 to €9 per family per week and not €1.5 to €5 as the government had said.

Dr Muscat insisted that the government's economic argument on the matter was flawed, pointing out that when in 2005 the economy was doing very well the government had said that an 83 per cent surcharge on bills was unsustainable only to raise bills by an equivalent of a 245 per cent increase in surcharge now that the economy was facing a storm.

At the beginning of the meeting a minute of silence was observed in remembrance of the late MP Karl Chircop whose funeral was held on Saturday.