It sounds like something out of Maoist China: “Information about non-Labourite families can be researched from Labour supporters in the vicinity. Try and gather as much information as you can, this could be useful...”
This is a quote from a strategy document, published internally in 2000 by the Malta Labour Party, which instructs party officials and candidates on how to collect, process and store personal information about different households in any locality: sometimes without their knowledge (still less their consent).
The information requested takes the form of personal details such as one's political allegiance, whether there are disabled members in the family, and even the habitual movements of individual family members, among other sensitive details.
Entitled “Charter 2000”, the document reads more like a handbook of political espionage, with two chapters dealing specifically with information gathering for the express purpose of building up a database on a Local Area Network (LAN).

Interestingly, the Charter lists door-to-door visits during election campaigns as key information gathering nodes, on a par with the street leader system, which it also describes at length.
Authored by the Labour executive of 2000 – including Alfred Sant, Joe Brincat, George Vella, Mario Vella, Michael Falzon, Alfred Grixti and Joe Mizzi – the charter explains that door-to-door visits serve two distinct purposes: 1) to explain the policies of the party and identify the concerns uppermost on the electorate’s minds, and; 2) to collect information about each and every family, in order to expand the pool of electoral information available for use by the party, district committees, local committees and candidates.
“Collection of information is to be carried out according to the attached form”, the document states, referring to a table to be filled in with the citizens’ ID number, name, date of birth, sex, marital status, workplace, description of job, and presumed political preference.
Significantly, Labour candidates are urged by their party executive to behave like market surveyors, even if the role is more reminiscent of a private investigator: “Remember that this exercise should be carried out like any other marketing exercise, so the prospective client (sic) should be studied well in advance.”
The document also suggests enlisting the services of Labour supporters in the vicinity to help provide information about non-Labour families: in other words, encouraging local political vigilantism.
“If the exercise is carried out among families who are Labour supporters, questions can be asked directly to the family members. If the families are not Labouites, you can try and gather the information upon leaving the house. Information about non-Labourite families can be researched from Labour supporters in the neighbourhood. Try and gather as much information as possible, this could be useful."
Ironically, this chapter is subtitled “Code of Ethics”.
Another section of the charter deals specifically with the network of data-collecting nodes active within any given community. The LAN, it explains, is composed of members and volunteers whose “duties” include the collection of information about the electorate.
These duties are explained in painstaking detail, listing out the areas of specific interest to the party. These areas even include patterns of movement of individual family members.
The full list is as follows: 1) political beliefs; 2) place of work; 3) profession/grade; 4) Number of children who have reached voting age; 5) Number of people who do not leave the house; 6) Number of handicapped persons.
This chapter also outlines the basic pecking order of political vigilantism: “LAN is a pyramid. Each area has a Leader who is responsible for this structure. Each locality is subdivided into a number of areas and there is an Area Leader for each one. Each street in these areas has a Street Leader. Streets are divided so that there are a number of Household Leaders who would have approximately 10 to 30 voters under their responsibility.”
This document presents itself as a “Code of Ethics”, and yet does not comment on the ethical considerations involved in getting citizens to spy on each other, nor on the possible unethical uses such information could be put to if passed on to third parties, such as commercial entities with interests outside the political sphere.
But Charter 2000 predates the Data Protection Act by one year, and therefore the advice it contains cannot be described as illegal at the time of publication. Today, however, any personal data collected by political parties (or indeed any organisation or individual) are subject to strict regulations, and with the exception of party members, such data cannot be maintained, processed or stored without the data subjects’ explicit consent.

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What you can do about illegally stored personal data

You can write to the secretary-generals of the MLP and PN – Jason Micallef and Paul Borg Olivier respectively – and ask to know what information is being kept about you.
Article 21 of the Data Protection Act of 2001 empowers citizens to access on demand any information stored about them by any organisation, including political parties, as well giving them the right to know how such information is used.
The only listed exemption involves party members (tesserati). Otherwise, such information can only be stored and processed with the “clear and unambiguous” consent of the data subject.
The obligations of the data processor (in this case, political parties) include: to respond to a citizen’s request for access within a reasonable timeframe; to make whatever data concerns the citizen available to that citizen; and also to inform the data subject how the data was acquired. Should the citizen request the deletion of such data, the processor has to provide compelling legal arguments not to comply.
In case no reply is forthcoming with a reasonable timeframe, or if the reply is in the negative, one is advised to report the matter to the office of the Data Protection Commissioner, and if necessary to seek legal advice.
The Data Protection Commissioner is the competent authority empowered to investigate all such cases.

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt