Monday's sitting of Trinidad and Tobago's Parliament saw the Opposition Leader quoting from several e-mails, which, he alleged, implicate key government ministers, including the Prime Minister, in attempting to cover up her administration's actions surrounding the Section 34 controversy. Netizens were taking notice. Twitter was unusually quiet, but many social media users who watched the No Confidence motion against the government play out, flooded their Facebook status updates with commentary about the goings-on. Some even posted notes, like this one by Christian Hume – its contents are reproduced in this post with the writer's permission: The good thing about Emailgate is that the majority of people who would decide the next General Election understand e-mail. The Attorney General himself has publicly stated that he has had a particular e-mail address for the last 15 years, which means that he too would have been among the earliest people in this country to sign up for e-mail back in 1997. I am therefore amused at the comical defenses being put up by himself and Anil Roberts in trying to convince people who do not understant e-mail (and some who do) that there is no connection between the e-mails read out in Parliament yesterday and the high government officials that they are purported to have come from. Soon, the discussion, both on and offline, turned to the authenticity of the e-mails. In this blog post, diaspora blogger Jumbie's Watch wrote: This revealed email exchange over the Section 34 débâcle is a deal breaker if it turns out to be true. Why I find it amusing though, is that it is so obviously fake. There are several clues which reveal right off, to those who are semi-literate in email technology, why said emails are fudged. First of all, and most strongly telling is that Gmail, even since its inception in 2004 (when people were paying for invitations to Gmail) did not allow for 4-character usernames. Not even 5… and I know; I was there… back in 2004, you had to use 6 alpha-numeric characters or more. Secondly…I have never seen such childish spelling and grammatical mistakes from Anand Ramlogan. Sure, one can argue that most people are far more informal in emails than in a commentary column… but even so some lineament of the writing style will continue to hold true. In other words, wolf cyah play sheep. Thirdly, how improbable is it for public figures in high positions to use ‘free’ email accounts to contact each other, when they have ‘official’ government provided email? What has me is a puzzled frame of mind is trying to fathom the reason Keith Rowley would bring this up in Parliament. Is he so naive that he would fall into the clutches of desperation? Malicious? Or is he merely dotish? Hume addressed that very question in his Facebook note: I'm hearing people saying that Dr. Rowley should have presented the technical verification of the authenticity of those e-mails in Parliament yesterday. Given that he read the contents of 31 e-mails, that would have been impractical, seeing that he only had 75 minutes in which to make his presentation. At any rate, the technical verfication of those e-mails would have been incomprehensible to the most of the national population, and I daresay, to almost all the members of the House of Representatives, including the Speaker himseslf. Instead, Dr.Rowley went one better. He took pains to explain the necessity for Parliamentary privilege, before using it to lay his case before House and country. In doing so, he is challenging Kamla, Anand, Suruj, and the PP machinery to deny the authenticity of the e-mails, and as most people in that situation would do, the PP spokespersons have already obliged bombastically. I am confident that the technical details that would verify the authenticity of those e-mails will start to emerge in the days to follow, and not necessarily from PNM quarters. Grab your pop corn, sit back and watch. Doh say ah didn't tell allyuh. The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society contributed to the discussion by tackling the topic of hacking. The post explained the phishing phenomenon, adding: The method of phishing emails pretending to be from a friend or organisation you know underscores the ease of faking emails. The from field in an email can have any text (e.g ‘lldjlkdladajdlk@sdkaldjal’) that looks like an email address and not be from the ‘real’ sender. In this context, one Facebook user, suggested that if the Prime Minister's e-mail was indeed hacked, she should have noticed irregularities in the use of her account. The TTCS post explained: To detect hacking attempts, one should set up two factor authentication which improves the security of your email account. One common implementation of two factor authentication uses your cell phone.