My name is Borg. Paul Borg. And I’m licensed to click. I am 002 and a bit and intrepidly, I shall sally forth (electronically) and valiantly I shall seek out the deepest hidden secrets of the enemies of the Realm and do all many of things to them.

Actually, my name is Paul Borg Olivier and I pressed “send” too quickly, as has anyone and everyone who ever sent more than a couple of emails in his life, and I have a three-egg omelette on my face.

Been there, done that myself, though I haven’t bought the t-shirt. There’s a marketing idea either the PN or the PL (or both can take up) – a t-shirt for all twats who have sent an email to the wrong person, thanks to the efforts of The Supreme Lord Gates and his cohorts to make things easier. They’re only easier if you are a total nerd who has OCD and checks everything three times before he does it – the rest of us just get on with it.

Just to appease the Lil’Elves, who will no doubt jump in below and call me all manner of names – in between circuitous and highly irrelevant discourses about everything under the sun, generally involving a contribution to the beatification of Dom Mintoff before the old buffer has even snuffed it – yes, the government does have too much data on all of us and, yes, I’ve no doubt the political parties would love to get their hands on it and, yes, this would not necessarily be a good thing.

But can we stop for a second before we all rush off to the hills, disconnecting anything that connects us to Big Brother? I’ve not looked into this “Web of Espionage” thing before this morning (this morning being Saturday and I’m desperate for something to take my mind off the briefcase full of work that I really have to tackle) and before this morning, I thought that what was being screamed hysterically about by everyone from Joe Muscat down to the most grassy of grass roots MLP – oops, sorry, PL – supporter was something that was, actually, serious.

Of course it would be wrong for a political party to be sent data about the yeomen and yeowomen of the Republic. Well, let’s actually grant that it would be wrong, because actually, it’s been done for so long that no-one really batted an eyelid about it. I trust no-one, even the Lil’Elves who will regale us with the fruits of their wit and wisdom down there, is naive enough to think that each and every Minister since Ministers were not only the chaps who preached mass at us (and even then, probably) hasn’t ever used politically relevant information for party ends. It’s just that nowadays, and this is why data protection has become important (and a darn good excuse for any government functionary to refuse to impart un-protected information when doing so might create work – but that’s a whole other story) it’s become a sight more efficient, for obvious reasons.

So, if PBO’s email blooper had been anything other than an email blooper, there would have been every reason for Joey M and all his little minions (are minions anything other than little?) to start having palpitations and conniptions and to cause blaring headlines to appear in the party comics. Coming after the conveniently-timed public palpitations and conniptions Alfred Sant (remember him?) was having because he – for reasons known only to himself – connected a cyber-attack on Government servers with some sort of incursion on the sanctity of his person (I exaggerate for comedic effect) it’s almost enough to make us all disconnect our routers and resort to snail-mail and voice-only communication, lest some dastardly “customer service” double-agent intercepts our communications and sends them to Pieta’.

Through the kind offices of maltastar.com, however, I was able, this morning, to have a squint (literally, I could hardly read it and it’s not only because my rheumy eyes are failing) at the smoking gun, a.k.a. Borg Olivier’s email.

Maltese, due to the cultural mores of the time of my youth, was not necessarily my first language in time-line terms, since I’ve no idea whether my mum, on being handed me, exclaimed about my cherub-like beauty in Maltese or in English, but since then I’ve managed to get a bit of a grasp of it. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, my Maltese is as good as my English. Armed with this, thus, I am able to give you a pretty accurate paraphrase of what I managed to read of the (in)famous email.

It tells us, folks, that there was a meeting between party guys and political liaison guys and ministry guys (I’m including both sexes in the “guys”) wherein it was decided that there would be an integration of data to be passed to the Office of the Prime Minister from Ministry Customer Care officials and from PN sources.

Notice the preposition “to”, describing precisely the flow of data from (another preposition) somewhere to (there it is again) somewhere (OPM, in this case) and not “between” anyone or anything like that.

In other words, the guys at the Ministries and the guys at the political level would standardise their data, and not share it, and send it in the standardised format to the OPM, which would, presumably, scream and shout at everyone concerned to act on it and get things done. My reading of BO’s email does not reveal, anywhere, any mechanism by means of which the information flow is reversed.

Lil’Elves might ask, as I’ve no doubt they will, what party people were doing in a meeting like this, to which the answer is obvious (well, it’s obvious unless you want to create a story out of nothing, which is par for the course)

Party people were there because, in the first place, there has always been and there always will be, political involvement at this sort of level – nothing wrong with that at all, it’s what Ministers are elected for, to give effect to their political mandate and they need political help in getting it done. And in the second place, in this particular instance, the party people are a heck of a lot better at getting this sort of thing done – certainly better than certain elements of the public service, who will get their salary whatever happens and certainly way, way better than their counterparts in the MLP, sorry, PL, as the election results over the last twenty years so.

Does this mean that the citizenry’s data will be compromised? Nope: not by what’s described in the email. So, bottom-line, my old friend Paul was a silly twit to press ‘send’ without checking who he was sending the email to, but that’s the sum total of it and it’s about time Joey and his buddies stopped crying wolf every time they spot a little kitty cat.