COMMENT | On a typical day in old town Petaling Jaya, my neighbourhood for the past 23 years, pre-dawn would see the early dozens of the later few hundred people who will, over the next few hours, gingerly mince their way over the splashy brown sludge that slimes the floor of the market, to make purchase of their daily or weekly needs.

Senior citizen scavengers will be scrabbling through rubbish bins and flattening cartons left outside shops overnight.

The coffee and mamak shops are full of people breaking the night’s fast.

Every day families, showing the anxious excitement of moving into a new clean space, house or a rented apartment, show up at the shops that will arm them with pails and mops and hoses.

The several banks open at 9.15am, and people gather to initiate the multiple in-and-outs of daily finance.

On such a typical day, while life thrummed and jangled in its multifarious mundane ways in old town PJ, someone decided it would be a good idea, for whatever purpose, to tap the phone of the then prime minister Najib Razak...