The PM at a press briefing. Photo courtesy Jyoti Communications website.
Three days ago Keith Rowley had my jaw on the floor….three days later it’s still there, but for entirely different reasons.
By now you’ve heard about EmailGate, or as I like to call it: Keep Calm and Change Yuh PassWord!
Opposition Leader Keith Rowley lead another No Confidence Motion against Kamla and her Motley Crew, this time levelling allegations that were nothing short of criminal against the Prime Minister, the AG, the Minister of Labour, Works, The Kitchen, The Kitchen Sink Toute Bagai and everyone’s favourite lapdog and baggage carrier, Gallery Griffith.
According to 30+ email exchanges read out by Rowley in Parliament on Monday, the PM and AG were well aware of the implications of S34, and were so pissed off at the diligence of reporter Denyse Renne, and DPP Roger Gaspard that they were conspiring to tap the phones of the DPP’s office, offer him a position on the judiciary as a bribe, and were considering doing harm to Ms Renne.
At the centre of this latest political shitstorm seemed to be the AG…or rather, his email accounts. One appeared to be anan@gmail.com while the other was a TSTT address.
Much ado was made about whether or not a person can have an email address shorter than 6 symbols in Parliament…had any of the MPs on either side of the house deigned to use their Ipads to conduct a Google search (see what I did there?) they would have gotten the answer in quick time and spared me sighing heavily at the monstrous stupidity of the proceedings. But you see, the last three days showed me in blatant terms how little we know about technologyin this country…and further how little we know about using it to build a case.
The AG…..
Dr Rowley took a massive gamble accusing the government of conspiring against the office of the DPP and conspiring to harm a citizen of the country with just a pile of transcripts. To have pulled it off successfully what was required were digital files or actual screen shots of the e-mails so that the members of the doubting public would have irrefutable proof, create a significant hue and cry and catapult the powers into action. In Rowley being the accuser, he had to realise that the burden of proof fell on him, and like the proverbial victim in a rape case, it was he who was on trial and not the perpetrator of the act of violation….unless of course, he playing coy and allowing the PP to hang themselves with their exuberance. But, again, even that is risky, unless he holding all the trump in his hands.
Without those digital files it all boiled down to playing the blame game….yet again. It is a game the country has been caught up in for the past 3 years and it has gotten old and tired. Despite the numerous scandals and missteps this government has gotten itself embroiled in, this Motion of No Confidence had the potential to land a PM, an AG and a senior government Minister in jail had it been handled right.
Now, three days later, with Keith pointing fingers and Kamla sticking out her tongue and saying prove it, we have the country right back where it started…wondering who lying. And all of this just mere months away from a Local Government Elections and a By-Elections.
Ironically enough, it is Rowley who may be hardest hit from this, because once again the question of the type of leader he will be is raised. In fact, Kamla had a ball with that question in Parliament today..and showed us just how petty and vindictive she can be.
The further irony is that with some team work from his small bench of MPs, the Opposition could have come out looking better. Instead, with the formidable Mr Imbert missing they seemed unprepared to properly discuss and dissect the implications of an electronic paper trail of a conspiracy.
You see, while it is possible for the email accounts of 4 people to be hacked and controlled remotely….it is impossible for the owners of these email accounts to not notice the emails that are being sent to and from their accounts…unless they were never checking them. And if, as the AG admits, the TSTT account is his primary account, then surely he should have noticed all of those e-mails moving back and forth…unless they want us to believe that they don’t check email at all and Keith was controlling 4 accounts remotely and e-mailing himself all hours of the day and night through their accounts.
See, here’s my take on where these e-mails came from…and I am using myself as an example.
I have a tablet and a smart phone….I have all of my email accounts stored on both devices. If I lost a device I’d have to change the password on all of the accounts through my computer or another smart device, and hope that my files weren’t all saved to the device’s internal memory storage. If I bought a new device like say a smart phone, I’d have to make sure I wiped the old phone before selling it or giving it away….something tells me that a device from one of the persons got lost, stolen, sold or misplaced….and friends of the Opposition got their hands on it and got the information.
Given that the starring figure in all of these e-mails seems to be the AG….I’m willing to bet it is either his blackberry or tablet…..I’d faster go with phone because so many messages were sent late in the night and were one liners….the larger a device is, the more we type. We tend to keep our phones on or close to us late at nights. Also, on phonse we tend to send quick, one-line responses.
If Stephen Williams wasn’t such a compromised Commissioner of Police, if we had a serious cyber crimes unit here, if the Integrity Commission actually functioned and if the President had the power he thinks he has….there would be an independent investigation and the first thing to be done would be to confiscate the devices of these individuals and to ask their email hosts for transcripts on the dates Rowley gave….
But this was a rape trial. Rowley accused them of fucking us over….it was up to him to prove there was unwanted penetration…and before he managed to accomplish that in Parliament…he pulled out.
Keep Calm and Change Yuh Password!
The Eternal Pantomime 
Reblogged this on morganbeach23.
I cannot tell a lie…I’ve been waiting patiently for your take on this.
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Your last paragraph confused me. Today – 22 May ’13 – Rowley and the entire opposition walked out after moving a very valid motion! The PM did not defend herself during the debate but chose, via an antiquated rule, to speak after Rowley who was the mover of the No Confidence motion!
Does the population really know what’s going on in T&T?
This antiquated rule as you claim was used TWICE by Manning to have the last say in the two times the UNC opposition leader Basdeo Panday tried to move against him….. At least the UNC did not walk out and stayed and voted for THEIR motion!!!!!!!!
That theory of the info being found on an old smart phone proves you do not know about technology. When you are finished with a phones all you have to do is go into setting and do a factory reset. It deletes everything off the phone immediately. Secondly the content of the emails is what the PM found laughable in the first place. They were never written by her or anybody else that was claimed to partake in the conversation. Thirdly the PM would change a phone and sell it or give it back to I.T. without doing a factory reset or deleting all accounts on it is very laughable indeed. Do you take this woman for an absolute fool? You don’t become Prime Minister being a total idiot and that is what you will have to be after seeing what happened to Anya. You excuses for Rowley’s stupidity if weak at best. Rowley’s best political move would have been to leak the info to the press and absove himself of all this backlash. Vanity got the best of him and he wanted to get all the credit. Now all he will end up getting is all the blame.
Nimrod, your entire diatribe is based on the phone being wiped before it gets lost, stolen or given away…really?
And the article is hinged on a whimsical guess that maybe somewhere. there was a phone owned by a PM lurking with dangerous , top secret info that no one deleted. It is just as credible as the paper brought to parliament.
The article focuses on more than that, Nimrod, but carry on.
so wait nah…the PP/SIA blogger maccoing squad only working for the PM or wah. How Numbrod fling Double & (and the othe accused) under de bus so. #nohonoramongstqueeves
Written like a true dumb cunt with no sense of independant ability to analyse anything that comes from the pnm….u blind brainless rat
Like you need to keep calm hoss. Press on.
what a ridiculous attempt to get Rowley off the hook! You and the Leader of the Opposition live in a fantasy world of mischief and fabrication. Your entire article is pure unadulterated shit!
All the people who keep making assumptions fail to recognize that it has to correspondence has to be proven as authentic before anything else can take place. Fitzgerald Hinds came on I95.5fm and stated the correspondence was type. So there is the answer. It is not first arty or credible info. Not even something on the page that can help you trace it back to the source. Not even an iota of text to prove it even came from the internet. Nothing. So what I am to believe is that anyone who knows my email can type something on a blank piece of paper and send it to the police and cause an investigation and have my computer and phone ceased? Trinidadians must be joking if they think that piece of paper can take anything to trial or court or ever search and seizure.
Jason, it’s not the piece of paper that going to land this issue in court…it’s the accusations. The info has been lodged with both the President and the IC, now it has been lodged in Parliament. The responsible thing to do is follow up on the accusations and rule them out…if action isn’t taken then you have a situation where an Opposition Leader accused a government of serious crimes and the Cabinet, the President, the IC and the Police service refused to investigate….and that will imply to any onlooker that all of these offices are compromised and biased.
Can you really not see that?
Your bias so strong that you cant see that is the hand being played?
Carry on Nimrod.
It will only move forward to the content, if the source is credible. There is a sequence to things. What do you think the Police are going to investigate? It is the validity of the correspondence. I cannot start a long investigation to a murder if the evidence is a fake gun. It does not work like that in the real world. The police cannot launch and investigation into a Prime Minister none the less on a type written piece of paper with not so much as a finger print to start off with. I think you all do not understand procedure properly. This is not an investigation into normal plebs like us you know. This is a high profile case with serious consequences to the police as well if they do not handle it according to procedure. they cannot just go an confiscate the PM stuff on a piece of paper anyone can type up and put an email on. Your expectations are too high for something with too little credible evidence. So I can type up a piece of paper and make it look like a conversation between him and Al Rawi with their email address on it and then go to the police with that and they should run and treat him like a common criminal on that. I does not work like that as much as you wish it did.
Jason, the mistake you make is to automatically assume the evidence is false…while I am waiting for it to be proven false….if the emails are false, then so are the allegations…let the investigation decide that.
I can only assume that you are an investigator that has seen the evidence, hence your confidence.
I automatically dismiss the correspondence as authentic. It is a typed letter with no way to trace the owner. It is bogus.
the other sad part of the whole story is that they Breakings from an independent investigation to be done.. and the PM has a very good tactical advantage here where IF the allegations are truly false.. it could signal the end of Dr Rowleys leadership of the PNM..
If the stuff is false as the AG and PM are calming.. why not let the neutral party investigate to put everybody’s mind at ease.. and to silent the PNM..
Back to Numbrod’s/SIA’s assertion about there being a “fake gun”, fake or not(as the investigation will determine) we do have the rotting corpse that is section 34. And we do have a co-coordinated online attack on the journalist(who was just doing her job) by persons who should be using state resources to monitor frozen chicken shipments instead of pulling skin at Lupe Fuentes videos and torrenting hentai. You guys are a disgrace to the online community. May the d6am0n l0rd$ smite thee for thine betrayal for 40 pieces of silver and black berry curve…I CURSE THEE TROLLS!!!!
Once again you have proven how poor information can make one make stupid assumptions. I will let Pantomime answer to whether or not they think I am a troll. My contribution has nothing to do with any previous alleged wrong doing. People try to link things conveniently. I am contributing strictly on the alleged emails. The fact remains that the piece of paper is a fraud.
I guess the bug found at the DPP’s office was a fraud too, Nimrod?
http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2013-05-23/spy-bug-dpp%E2%80%99s-office
Press on without a clean investigation and summation of findings.
You know that leak by the PNM seven months late with the UNC in the dark about it’s occurrence just brings more questions as to if the rumours of the DPP being PNM is true. I don’t think the PNM helped the DPP by leaking that info now. It should have been done when it happened.
I’d wait for more info and a valid investigation before making the leaps you making.
After reading the many comments left, I can only assume that we as trinidadians have a blind sense of loyalty, which is why governments in and out continue to insult our intelligence and embarrass us with their intermediate forms of schoolboy debate and policy. I had to ask myself if some of the comments made was about the same blog I just read where Pantomime indicated – “monstrous stupidity of the proceedings” “Rowley accused them of fucking us over….it was up to him to prove there was unwanted penetration…and before he managed to accomplish that in Parliament…he pulled out.” ” we have the country right back where it started…wondering who lying “.. After reading many blogs and editorials for many years the conclusion that I have is any incumbent government it seems cannot be criticized when we must as a population have them under a microscope. I don’t care if Rowley is an ass or made an ass of himself, but the fact remains “what if”. What if there is some truth to any of the shit that was said… WE the citizens elected a Government and an ALSO the Opposition.. Rowley may be an Idiot, but we the citizens put him there to oppose… The blogger commenting on Kamla not being an Idiot clearly is not living in the present and may have even forgotten the past when while in opposition she made an ass of herself many many times during debates… But then when we the population choose to defend blatant missteps and defend everything that any of our incumbent government does, we the citizens are always the ones getting fucked… State funds are spent wildly on all sorts of shit and we know it, so why not investigate this? But then let’s roll over trinidadians, let’s continue to make excuses, let’s continue to defend while we continue watch the elected fuck us over… Maybe we can get a helicopter ride after everything has settled…..
Now yuh see, when I say ting like dat ppl does vex wid me. I’s no joke.. at one stage people wanted to have me extradited from the UK and stripped of my TT citizenship, because I dis few ppl wid similar criticism. But don’t take it the wrong way. I think that appropriate criticism is fine (as above). I’s those who cannot stand criticism or cannot be self-critical, who are deficient. So I applaud your response – really, I mean it. I’m not being sarcastic or anything.
I also wanted to share some tips on this for the benefit of other readers: “I have a tablet and a smart phone….I have all of my email accounts stored on both devices. If I lost a device I’d have to change the password on all of the accounts through my computer or another smart device, and hope that my files weren’t all saved to the device’s internal memory storage.”
Google email has very advanced security that avoids this common problem above. Basically it does this by creating device specific passwords, which you could disable from your Google settings in your Google account.
Another tip is to use RoboForm (www.roboform.com). The Roboform Everywhere, ensures that you do not store passwords on your devices which access your email or other website accounts. It may sound strange, but this is true and RoboForm has served me very well over the last couple years. So with RoboForm, you never need to change passwords because nobody can access your passwords.
Truecrypt (www.truecrypt.org) provides a really good way to encrypt and hide (totally) importatnt files on a hard disk. I used it with Carbonite. So when I open a Truecrypt disk on my laptop (which may appear as drive M), it will autobackup to Carbonite (in the cloud) and that’s encrypted anyway. When I close drive M – it’s totally invisible, and practically undiscoverable.
With the above three going, if my laptop is stolen I’m not worried because Carbonite holds all, my passwords are never accessible and highly confidential data are always invisible thanks to Truecrypt. I hope this assists others who need to make their systems more secure.
So pantomime the National Security Minister has spoken to the bug as being false. Are you willing to believe the statement? I know no matter what you do some people will not believe anything. After the investigation if it comes back that the document is a hoax you will hear PNM supporters saying that the police do rubbish. I wonder if that is why Dr. Rowley made it his business to discredit the police in advance? Maybe he know what the end result would be and is preparing for the inevitable. Dr. Rowley keeps saying wait for the investigation to end before you write off the document. Why couldn’t he take his own advice and wait for it to end before publicly writing off the police?
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