Parliament's SRI Oversight Committee: Over 6 mln people wiretapped in 2015 - 2016

More than six million people were wiretapped between 2005 and 2016, Claudiu Manda, Chair of Parliament's Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) Oversight Committee, said on Thursday, quoting a report prepared by the Committee.

"One of the conclusions of the Committee's report is that the restriction of the citizens' rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution has been done on a large scale, by abusively using these legal instruments, namely national security mandates, technical surveillance mandates, or technical surveillance authorizations ordered by prosecutors. We have at the committee data that show that we have an increase in national security mandates from 1,395 in 2005 to 3,701 mandates in 2013, that is nearly three times as many as compared to 2005. (...) All these authorization and monitoring acts over the period 2005-2016 mean more than 311,000 mandates. In the context in which, on a supervisory mandate, as we have seen and heard at the committee, we can think that there are 20 people or wiretapped phones on average, we can think that there have been more than 6 million people who were wiretapped throughout this period," Manda told a press conference at the Parliament Palace.

He added that the figure of 6 million only refers to mandates implemented by SRI, but there were also DNA (National Anticorruption Directorate, ed.n.) mandates, and under these circumstances, the number of the wiretapped people increases.

According to Manda, Parliament's SRI Oversight Committee on Thursday worded a partial report, which was adopted, on a series of issues discovered by this Committee, which have been brought to its attention since September last year and up to now.