Parties clash over wiretapping bill provisions
Opposition charges that the law aims not at transparency but at covering authorities’ tracks
Ahead of a parliamentary debate, government and opposition clashed Wednesday over whether the provisions of a draft bill on wiretapping address privacy concerns raised by recent revelations that the cellphones of political leaders, ministers, journalists and others were tapped using spyware.
With elections looming in the first half of next year, the government would like to put the issue behind it, while the opposition aims to highlight it as a backslide against personal freedoms that reflects the government’s, and, specifically, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’, authoritarian tendencies.
The government said it has taken specific steps to address the issue after it emerged that the phone of socialist leader Nikos Androulakis had been targeted with spyware.
“From the moment irregularities in the system were detected, the government undertook political initiatives to solve the problems, bravely accepted responsibilities and helped justice,” government spokesman Giannis Oikonomou said Wednesday, adding that the present draft bill addresses the issues “convincingly.”
The bill provides for a lapse of three years before informing people whose phones were tapped for security reasons without being suspects themselves, while mandating that surveillance records be destroyed after six months. The main opposition SYRIZA said this provision merely allows the government to cover its tracks. The government spokesman countered that under existing legislation, surveillance evidence can be erased from the very first day.
Socialist PASOK noted that under the draft proposal, its leader, Androulakis, will fight the next election without knowing why the lifting of his communications privacy was ordered. A socialist spokesman noted that the law aims at a cover-up, not transparency.
The Authority for Communication Security and Privacy (ADAE), the independent watchdog on communication privacy, waded into the debate Wednesday by expressing its “surprise and institutional displeasure” that it was not consulted on the draft bill, which “drastically changes the regulatory framework that has been in force for almost 30 years regarding the lifting of the confidentiality of communications and modifies the operation of ADAE in many critical points.”
The draft legislation has been put to public consultation until November 22 on the OpenGov website.
