“Regarding the illegal monitoring by various software, which are circulating in the markets, the government has emphatically emphasized that it has not procured such means”, says the Minister of State
“It’s not just a difficult equation. It is a battle to combine technology with democracy and national security with the rule of law”, the Minister of State writes in “Kathimerini” about surveillance. George Gerapetritis. And he suggests, the country’s political staff “with courage and self-criticism to diagnose the existing pathologies and their causes and to support creative proposals to improve structures and processes”.
Starting with the data, “first of all, a distinction must be made between legal declassification of communications and illegal surveillance. The legal removal of confidentiality is carried out in particular by the EYP and the Greek Police for reasons of national security, such as the case we are discussing, or for the investigation of particularly serious crimes. Illegal monitoring is carried out with illegal software which may be possessed by states, above all illiberally or completely, or by non-state bodies and individuals”, he notes and specifies in the continuation of the article: “Regarding the legal removal of privacy, there is already a regulatory framework in Greece framework which is stricter than the European average. The removal is carried out only with the approval of a public prosecutor and is notified to the Communications Privacy Assurance Authority (ADAE), a constitutional authority with high guarantees of impartiality, which submits an annual relevant report to the Parliament. The content of the communication, if there is no reason, is destroyed and the subject of the removal can be informed afterwards, when the removal was done for the verification of crimes, but not for reasons of national security. The law does not distinguish categories of citizens who are completely protected from the removal of privacy when the legal conditions are met.”
Focusing immediately afterwards on recent events, these highlighted, as he writes, “certain chronic pathologies that should be evaluated. This concerns in particular the lack of sufficient filters before declassification to further substantively check whether the reasons invoked by the public authority justify declassification and limited accountability.’
The Minister of State, however, also invokes the Act of Legislative Content of August 9, 2022, which “established for the first time a hearing of the Governor of the E.Y.P. by the Institutions and Transparency Committee before taking up his duties and reinstated the obligation to approve the lifting of confidentiality also by a second prosecutor, a provision which had been repealed by law in 2018. Of course, other possibilities for systemic interventions remain, such as the further tightening of the procedure lifting of privacy for special categories of citizens, especially for the E.Y.P. the adoption of an internal control system, the establishment of a standardized procedure for receiving, evaluating and managing information based on objective criteria, the drafting of codes of conduct for executives, the revision and updating of the disciplinary law, the development of a special system for evaluating executives, the organizational restructuring of the service and the developing a system of accountability’.
However, “interventions should not reach an excessive bureaucracy and perforation that will undermine the operational capacity of the service, nor should procedures of responsibility be set that will lead the executives of the E.Y.P. and judicial officials to be discouraged from taking the necessary decisions in a timely manner”, he clarifies on the other hand and continues: “Without discounts on the fundamental rights of citizens but also with an eye to the protection of national security, which the Constitution itself in 4 different articles it represents a major good of the state. National security which is being tested by escalating threats from outside”.
Furthermore, “regarding the illegal monitoring by various software that are circulating in the markets, the government has emphasized that it has not procured such means”, he assures. Which, he adds, “is confirmed beyond any doubt by an audit report of July 2022 of the independent National Transparency Authority, which was based on the Authority’s on-site investigation of both public authorities and the companies supplying the relevant software, in fact exhausting the investigation and the confidential expenses provided for by law”.
But, “unfortunately, the rapidly escalating problem of illegal surveillance software is linked to the development of technology and emerges acutely everywhere, since these software appear to be more sophisticated than the legal means of surveillance possessed by state structures internationally”, acknowledges C Gerapetritis, who adds: “The issue is of great concern to the European Union and all countries, but no way has been found anywhere – the example of Spain is typical, where there was a confession of the inability to identify the source of the illegal surveillance of the Prime Minister himself . In Greece, these illegal interventions in the privacy of communications are currently being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office and the A.D.A.E.
In conclusion, “it is not just a difficult equation. It is a battle to marry technology with democracy and national security with the rule of law. There is no room for political opportunism in this battle. What the political staff has to do today is with courage and self-criticism to diagnose the existing pathologies and their causes and to support creative proposals for the improvement of structures and processes. Otherwise, from this discussion we risk all losing – and above all the country”.
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