Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Busi­ness­man Ger­ald Aboud has raised sev­er­al queries about pri­va­cy rights in Trinidad and To­ba­go, in­clud­ing who is polic­ing the po­lice.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Aboud, who is the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Star­lite Group, asked, “Who is pro­tect­ing cit­i­zens’ pri­va­cy?”

He did so fol­low­ing the Hadeed-Star Sab­ga is­sue and the leak of a pur­port­ed au­dio clip by Sab­ga.

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice is prob­ing the leak of the voice note, which sur­faced short­ly af­ter Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der filed an af­fi­davit in the High Court de­fend­ing his de­ci­sion to place Sab­ga in pre­ven­tive de­ten­tion dur­ing the cur­rent State of Emer­gency. Alexan­der’s af­fi­davit re­ferred to in­ter­cept­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions in­volv­ing Sab­ga.

Voice note ex­cerpts were cir­cu­lat­ed last week­end on so­cial me­dia, in­clud­ing as a Tik­Tok “break­ing news” video and an­oth­er reel on Face­book head­ed “Stop Racism”.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, Aboud said, “As a con­cerned cit­i­zen, I am ask­ing a sim­ple ques­tion: what pri­va­cy rights do we ac­tu­al­ly have in Trinidad and To­ba­go? The gen­er­al pub­lic is now very con­cerned about their pri­va­cy rights, de­pri­va­tion in some form or fash­ion, and gen­er­al­ly won­der­ing if vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties ex­ist and what will be done to rec­ti­fy this.”

“The re­cent leak­ing of a pri­vate voice note re­port­ed­ly in­volv­ing a mem­ber of the Sab­ga fam­i­ly rais­es con­cerns that go far be­yond the in­di­vid­u­als in­volved: what forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion can legal­ly be mon­i­tored—tele­phone calls, What­sApp mes­sages, voice notes, emails, pho­tographs or so­cial me­dia?

Aboud added, “We must al­so ask whether par­tic­u­lar groups are be­ing tar­get­ed, in­clud­ing mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty some­times la­belled the ‘one per cent,’ as well as jour­nal­ists, ac­tivists, po­lit­i­cal op­po­nents or or­di­nary cit­i­zens who speak out.”

He asked, “Who de­cides whom to mon­i­tor? Are war­rants re­quired? Who has ac­cess to the in­for­ma­tion col­lect­ed—and, most im­por­tant­ly, who is polic­ing the po­lice?”