A company director claiming to have “good relations” with the Prime Minister tried to broker eavesdropping software and sell it to the Security Service, e-mail leaks show.
The incident goes back to May 2013 when Duncan Barbaro Sant, director at Alberta, a fire safety and security firm, was in touch with a controversial hacking company in an attempt to broker their services.
The e-mail exchange forms part of 400 gigabytes of data retrieved from Italian web security firm Hacking Team after it was itself the victim of a ‘hacktivist’ attack.
Mr Barbaro Sant sought information from Hacking Team on spy software, which he intended to sell to the Security Service. In one of the e-mails he asked Hacking Team for direction on how to approach the government and to forward him a sample of their work.
“Maybe you can forward me a sample for me to forward to them [Security Service] and to the Prime Minister with whom I also have good relations [for what it’s worth],” Mr Barbaro Sant wrote. However, a government statement said yesterday the Prime Minister never had meetings on the matter. “OPM [Office of the Prime Minister] records show that he [Prime Minister] never received any letter as the one which one of the authors of the e-mails seems to imply that he wanted to draft and send.”
Prime Minister never had meetings on the matter
It insisted the legal interception system, including e-mail interception capability, owned by the Security Service was procured by the previous administration.
“No further procurement in this area was made by the current administration.”
The leaked e-mails show how Mr Barbaro Sant was given a presentation of the firm’s hacking products, “to attack, infect and monitor target PCs and smartphones in a stealth way”.
However, the matter did not go far because the Security Service never got back with an answer after having met the Alberta director.
When contacted about the e-mails, Mr Barbaro Sant said he got in touch with Hacking Team after learning about them at a London counter-terrorism fair.
He said that Alberta was heavily involved in Libya and wanted to act as a broker for large companies who stayed away from the beleaguered north African State.
“We felt that Malta was so exposed to the threats emanating from a neighbouring country, even back then, that this software looked like a good tool to help the police track and identify any terrorist activity that may be approaching,” Mr Barbaro Sant said.
He described his subsequent meeting with the Malta Security Service as “very silent and awkward”.
“At no point did they communicate... they did not speak and lived up to their name and kept everything secret,” Mr Barbaro Sant said, adding his company has not had any contact with the security service since then. He insisted he did not know about Hacking Team’s shady reputation back then. He stressed Alberta has had no connection whatsoever with Hacking Team since 2013.
The e-mail leaks that include invoices were yesterday uploaded on Wikileaks, a whistleblower website.
Times of Malta yesterday reported how the Security Service last month had met salespeople from Hacking Team, who were interested in selling their software.
The leader of the Opposition, Simon Busuttil yesterday said he would raise the matter at the next meeting of the Security Committee, which oversees the operations of the secret service.
The committee that meets in confidence is made up of the Prime Minister, the Home Affairs and Foreign ministers and the Opposition leader.
“People do not want a big brother government that spies on them. And the Opposition will give a voice to people’s concerns,” he said.
He called on the Prime Minister to come clean and explain his personal involvement in this affair.