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G. Gerapetritis for follow-ups: To support creative proposals for the improvement of structures and procedures

“It’s not just a difficult equation. It’s a battle to combine technology with democracy and national security with the rule of law,” State Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis writes in “Kathimerini” about surveillance. And he suggests, the political staff of the country “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”.

Starting from the data, “first of all, a distinction must be made between legal declassification of communications and illegal surveillance. Legal declassification is carried out in particular by the EYP and the Hellenic Police for reasons of national security, as in the case we are discussing, or for the verification of particularly serious crimes. Illegal surveillance is carried out with illegal software which may be possessed by states, above all illiberally or totally, 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 that is stricter than the European average. The removal is only carried out with the approval of a public prosecutor and is notified to the Communications Privacy Assurance Authority (A.D.A.E.), a constitutional authority with high guarantees of impartiality , which submits an annual relevant report to the Parliament.The content of the communication, if no reason arises , it is destroyed and the subject of the removal can be informed after the fact, 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 adequate filters before declassification to further verify in substance whether the reasons invoked by the public principle justify declassification and limited accountability”.

However, the Minister of State 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 assuming his duties and reinstated the obligation approval of the lifting of confidentiality by a second public prosecutor, a provision which was repealed by law in 2018. Of course, other possibilities for systemic interventions remain, such as the further tightening of the procedure for lifting confidentiality for special categories of citizens, especially for 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 disciplinary law, the development of a special system for evaluating executives, the organizational restructuring of the service and the development of a system of accountability”.

However, “interventions should not amount to an excessive bureaucracy and perforation that will undermine the operational capacity of the service, nor should accountability procedures be set that will lead E.Y.P. officers and judicial officials to be discouraged from the timely taking of the necessary decisions”, he clarifies on the other hand and continues: “Without discounts on the fundamental rights of citizens but also with an eye on the protection of national security, which the Constitution itself in 4 different articles declares to be a major good of the state. National security 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, as such software appears 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 nowhere has a way to be intercepted been found – the example of Spain is typical, where there was a confession of the impossibility of identifying 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 Public Prosecutor’s Office and the A.D.A.E.

In conclusion, “it is not simply a difficult equation. It is a battle to combine technology with democracy and national security with the rule of law. There is no place in this battle for political opportunism. What political personnel have 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 losing everyone – and above all the country”.

Source: AMPE

Source: Capital

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