TSTT oversight

SINCE the emergence of a cyber attack on TSTT last October, we have moved from inadequate accountability to having a flood of personal explanations about what went wrong. None of it has clarified anything.

Marvin Gonzales apologised to Parliament on Friday for unintentionally misleading the House in his capacity as line minister.

TSTT officials on Monday gave the most detailed account yet of the attack, telling MPs on a committee that hackers obtained a “golden password” reserved for administrators.

And Lisa Agard, the former TSTT CEO, broke her silence to strongly deny any suggestion she ever provided any misleading or inaccurate information to Mr Gonzales.

Notwithstanding, there are even more questions relating to not only TSTT’s operations but also its relationship with the Minister of Public Utilities.

While a motion of privilege against the minister will not proceed, and while we await the findings of an independent probe, the parliamentary committee examining this matter must get to the bottom of what exactly happened.

It is good to see, months after the fact, all this candour. In weighing security and commercial imperatives with the need for transparency, TSTT has too often got the balance wrong.

From the start, confirmation of the attack came troublingly late. In fact, whether through recklessness or otherwise, TSTT stands accused of downplaying the issue in a manner that potentially opened the door to being misconstrued.

Before her departure, Ms Agard had to apologise last November for how things were handled, saying, “We were so busily focused on identifying the problem, containing it and restoring full capability to serve our customers that we neglected perhaps to communicate effectively.”

The “ineffective” communication extended to Ms Agard’s own dismissal days later. So opaque were the circumstances of that departure even she complained of not being given a chance to resign.

All of it adds credibility to Mr Gonzales’s account, given in Parliament on Friday, of how he came to mislead the nation. He stated he relied on “information provided to me by the executive and/or the board.” Crucially, he also referred to a circular to customers dated October 29 in which an unnamed official said no compromise of data had occurred.

If the minister misunderstood the ordinary meaning of the word “compromise,” so did the entire country.

With so much at stake at a billion-dollar state entity, it is incredible, if not implausible, to hear how such a spectacular breakdown of accountability hinged on the idiosyncratic definition of a word that required no definition at all.

And that is the bigger issue. If there is a silver lining here, it is that a spotlight has been placed on the need for state entities to be truly subject to the careful oversight of their line ministry in circumstances that merit it.