They say people should never be allowed to see how sausages are made. And laws. The making of laws is a queasy business. The ongoing debate in Europe about a media freedom law has gotten ugly and has come up on a disturbing juncture. The original draft of the European Commission proposed strict rules against tapping the phones of journalists and spying on their computers. Israeli technology that is supposed to be used to fight very serious violent crimes and terrorism has been used in the past to watch who journalists speak with. The Commission proposed a ban on the activity.

The law was discussed a few days ago by ministers of the national governments of the member states. France proposed, and the other countries agreed, to introduce an exception to the rule banning spying on journalists’ devices. The exception is “national security” which proposes to give governments a license to tap journalists’ communications without them knowing.

Even if governments never use this power, knowing it exists will scare off whistle-blowers and sources who are warned by the law that no journalist can guarantee to protect their identity. If a journalist promises a source confidentiality, they may not know that they’re in no position to keep such a promise. Scared sources do not give information. Information which is not given is denied to citizens who have a right to know the conduct of people to whom citizens lend power.

I will speak highly of few governments in the EU and whatever I might think of this or that incumbent we have seen European electorates elect autocratic governments with little regard to free speech and even less regard to the free flow of information that might embarrass them.

But let’s not complicate the debate unnecessarily, shall we? Can you imagine Joseph Muscat, empowered with a European law that provides him with the excuse of citing national security, restraining himself from tapping Daphne Caruana Galizia’s computer and phone? Without the specific national security exception, a decision like that may look arbitrary. With an explicit exception inserted in a law that is officially intended to guarantee media freedom he could present listening in on his “harshest critic” and the perpetrator of “the greatest lie in Malta’s political history that (risked) destabilising the country” – as he called Daphne – as an obligation, in the national interest.

This is a truly horrible development, in itself a threat to journalism the true democratic value of which is realised when journalists acquire information that governments would want to hide. This is anything but ‘Daphne’s law’.

It empowers governments to decide when they can opt out of the rule of law because they alone define the national interest and their deliberations are the secrets that this “exception” seeks to preserve.

The law, as changed, will need the European Parliament’s approval before it is adopted. We can only hope that our representatives rank citizens’ right to know above obscure notions of so-called national security.