Poles Should Expect Outsourcing of Surveillance to the NSA (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland)

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Poles Should Expect Outsourcing of Surveillance to the NSA (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland)

"If Polish authorities agreed to the eavesdropping of Polish citizens by foreign intelligence services without the consent of a Polish court, it would be something akin to consenting to CIA prisons in Poland. … [When the Polish surveillance law expires,] if the BND and NSA are already doing this, the Polish services could perhaps count on a gentleman's favor when they lose their right to keep us under surveillance. This is nothing less than the outsourcing of surveillance - and practically free of the inconvenient constraints of the law."

By Ewa Siedlecka

Translated By Ludmila Gustaw-Edwards

July 20, 2015

Poland - Gazeta Wyborcza - Original Article (Polish)

We've already had Tax Freedom Day - and here comes Surveillance Freedom Day - at least in legal terms. Of course, that's if you don't count the friendly surveillance conducted by the NSA or the German services - and the surveillance of Mr. Google or Mr. Facebook.

On February 6 next year, legal provisions that allow police and the secret services to conduct surveillance will disappear. All of it! This will be the result of a judgment by the Constitutional Court a year ago - and the government has yet to prepare regulations to replace them. It was put on its work schedule in March, but at this point there isn't even an outline of how to approach the project.

A few weeks ago, the Sejm Speaker and a group of senators from the Civic Platform (PO) presented a plan to the lower chamber on how to implement Court decision as sparingly as possible. For example, the Court held that it's necessary to establish the maximum time that surveillance of an individual is permitted. The senators propose that police should be limited to a year and a half. Other services, however, [like the intelligence agencies], have no such limitations; although the Court didn't exempt them from its decision.

The Court decision says that individuals placed under surveillance must be notified of the surveillance when their case is closed - and not just when the person was eavesdropped on, but who they were communicating with when they were listened to. This is to give individuals the right to file a complaint on the legality of the procedure, which is the European standard. The Court stressed that there may be exceptional cases in which the Court would waive the obligation to notify a targeted person. While the senators wrote a regulation allowing for the exception, they failed to include any duty to notify.

There are additional reservations on the issue, but there is little chance new rules will be enacted before February 6 next year. Work hasn't even begun, so when the new parliament convenes in November lawmakers will have to start all over again.

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Will police and other surveillance cease from February 6? Surely the courts will halt the issuance of new consent orders. And what will the unmonitored [spy] services do? No one will check, as it's in no one's interest nor has anyone the tools to do so. This has happened once before. On July 3, 2010, the CBA [Central Anticorruption Bureau], a year after an earlier decision of the Court, lost its right to collect and store sensitive data and the government didn't manage to have an amendment passed on time. No one has ever explained what CBA activity at the time consisted of or what happened to the sensitive data the CBA had in its possession between July and September, 2010 (after which the amendment restoring these powers came into force).

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And how about our friends in the American NSA or German BND? On July 29, Austrian MP Peter Piltz, at a conference organized in the Sejm by lawmaker Anna Grodzka, presented an agreement concluded in 2004 between the German Federal Intelligence Service (the BND) and Deutsche Telekom, entitling the former, as well as the NSA, to install an eavesdropping system at Deutsche Telekom headquarters in Frankfurt, where Europe's largest telecommunications transit hub is located. Piltz also showed records of inspections carried out on these connections. The German and U.S. secret services seemed most interested in links from the Netherlands, France and Poland.

A few weeks ago, the head of the BND [Gerhard Schindler] asked about the agreement during a hearing of the Bundestag's NSA Committee of Inquiry in relation to the PRISM program disclosed by Edward Snowden. According to him, eavesdropping on Poles by the BND and NSA is legal. This may mean that such spying is conducted on the basis of an agreement with the Polish services [the Office of State Protection or Urząd Ochrony Państwa]. A coalition of Polish NGOs has been asking the government since the PRISM affair began whether such an agreement exists. To no avail. And that's hardly surprising, because if Polish authorities agreed to the eavesdropping of Polish citizens by foreign intelligence services without the consent of a Polish court, it would be something akin to consenting to CIA prisons in Poland.

So – if the BND and NSA are already doing this, the Polish services could perhaps count on a gentleman's favor when they lose their right to keep us under surveillance. Particularly useful may be the NSA, which monitors Europeans through the use of Google, Facebook, Skype and several other American Internet giants. They have everything, because what attracts us to register with these sites involves our favorite gadgets - mobile phones, smartphones and most importantly, iPhones.

This is nothing less than the outsourcing of surveillance - and practically free of the inconvenient constraints of the law.

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GLOBAL ARCHIVE ON MASS SURVEILLANCE:

Der Spiegel, Germany: X-Keyscore: NSA Spying Far Worse than Germans Thought

Die Welt, Germany: 'Spook's Bazaar': Selling Off Press Freedom at the Behest of NSA Spies

Mediapart, France: NSA Spying Exposes Cataclysmic Failure of French Intelligence

Liberation, France: NSA Spying on the French: 'Another Mask has Fallen'

Polityka, Poland: Americans Suffer 'Pearl Harbor Attack' of Cyber Cold War

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany: Watchdog Issues Chancellery 'Ultimatum' on NSA 'Selectors'

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany: U.S. Spies and Angela Merkel: For Years, 'Guided by Wishful Thinking'

Der Spiegel, Germany: Betrayal and Betrayers: Merkel's High-Risk Silence in the NSA-BND Scandal

Joop, The Netherlands: Senior Elsevier Columnist Falls for ISIS-Snowden Hoax