Members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party want to make it easier for Polish authorities to electronically surveil citizens by giving officers easier access to their emails and social media messages.
The lower house of the Polish parliament is working on the government’s draft electronic communications law. In 2021 alone, the authorities accessed Poles telecomms data 1.82 million times.
Among other things, the bill provides for the storage of emails on the servers of companies offering email services. At the request of the relevant court, the service provider would be obliged to make available the data of the message’s author, including, for example, their IP address and, if necessary, the content of the email itself.
The new legislation would also make it easier for the services to access conversations on Messenger or WhatsApp.
The bill has been criticised by opposition politicians. “Today, the services have the possibility from the operators, i.e. those with whom we have numbers, to simply have access to information such as the calls we made, where we logged in, what websites were viewed,” said MP Arkadiusz Marchewka of the liberal Civic Coalition (KO).
Opposition politicians refer in their criticism of the bill to the fact that some of them were targeted with the Pegasus spyware software.
“Pegasus did not work, i.e. it worked, but [those in power – ed.] had to give it back, so a bill needs to be drafted quickly to continue large-scale surveillance of Polish citizens,” said KO MP Grzegorz Napieralski.
Opposition activists also point out that the bill gives exceptional privileges to the president of the Office of Electronic Communications, who will be able to block communications calls that he deems dangerous to the state within six hours.
“During the election campaign, he can simply block our communications”, Napieralski believes.
Experts also commented on the project. “The ruling party would like the services to have simpler access to our messages, but I think that a lot will depend on where the company that provides the service enabling the correspondence is based,” believes Wojciech Klicki, an expert from the Panoptykon Foundation, told Onet.pl. His organisation deals, among other things, with the analysis of state surveillance on its citizens.
“To put it bluntly – the owner of Twitter is unlikely to be motivated to hand over conversations to the Polish services,” he added.
(Bartosz Sieniawski | EURACTIV.pl)
Source: euractiv.com
