PASOK says EYP should report to ministry, privacy watchdog’s role should be restored
Greece’s Socialists tabled three amendments in Parliament on Thursday that would return control of the country’s intelligence service EYP to the Citizen Protection Ministry and would allow the independent watchdog on communication privacy ADAE to inform citizens of their surveillance after it had stopped, as a parliamentary committee continues its inquiry into the wiretapping scandal.
The recommendations follow the revelation that EYP had tapped the phone of PASOK/KINAL’s leader Nikos Androulakis from September 2021 and up to his election as party leader in December of the same year. Androulakis also inadvertently fended off an attempt to install Predator, an illegal spyware software, on his cellphone at the same period of time. Before Androulakis, financial journalist Thanassis Koukakis had also discovered he had been spied on by EYP and that his phone had been hacked by Predator.
After coming to power in July 2019, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis placed EYP under his direct control and with an amendment tabled in 2021 the government banned ADAE from informing retrospectively individuals that they had been a subject of surveillance if it has done on grounds of national security.
PASOK said EYP’s set of responsibilities and personnel should be moved under the Minister of Citizen Protection, while the Hellenic Authority for Communications Security and Privacy (ADAE) should be allowed again to notify the affected person of a decision to lift the privacy of one’s communications.
In other words, ADAE should return to the previous status which existed from 1994 to 2021, when ruling New Democracy stripped the watchdog of this ability, leading “to a regime of panoptic impunity,” the party said in a press release.
PASOK also recommended that any decision to lift confidentiality should include the authority that has ordered the surveillance, the name of the prosecutor or the investigative magistrate requesting it, the reason of the lifting of confidentiality, the duration of the order, the date of issuance of the order, and the name of the person or persons who will be surveilled, as well as their address, if known.
The amendments will be added to a bill that is being debated in the Plenary.
