Meanwhile in Poland...
The gubmint has just validated the project of a law meant to reform some parts of the way the police and the secret services operate, now it will have to be delivered to the senate. Within is a very controversial law that allows the services to shamelessly spy on the populace by putting the internet and people's correspondence under surveillance! Or at least that's what you'll hear in the news about this. But for the meantime, let us travel a bit back in time...
The first version of this law was passed in 2006, back when PiS was first in power (2005-2007). The law said that the services could inspect people's correspondence at their leisure, with no external check overseeing this. They could just go ahead and gain access to people's stuff, including tech data like who sent a message to whom but also the actual contents of said messages.
PiS was valiantly dethroned in 2007 and PO (2007-2015) took the steering wheel.
The 2006 law was still in effect. And nothing kept changing about it until finally in 2014 (!) someone brought it to the attention of the constitutional court, which deemed the law to be unconstitutional and that it would have to be reformed. The court even provided advice regarding an easy and quick way of fixing it - the secret service could still inspect technical data of any given communications, but a limit would need to be imposed on the way they'd access the content. For instance, that limit could be regional court rulings that would judge whether such breaches of confidentiality were necessary in security proceedings.
The court ruling was proclaimed in july 2014. The gubmint (PO) did nothing about it. They just showed the court the middle finger and left the ruling to rot.
Fastforward to today, the project by PiS is a de facto carrying out of the constitutional court's ruling. It takes the old 2006 law that gave the services unlimited surveillance potential and imposes upon it an additional check in the form of regional court rulings being necessary to access private message contents.
The public outcry to this is, naturally, DEATH OF DEMOCRACY! TYRANNY! MASS-SURVEILLANCE! ABSOLUTELY NEW DRACONIAN LAW THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SO BAD BEFORE!
The deal is also being attached to the central media narrative that 'pis has been in power for barely 2 months and they are passing new totalitarian laws in record speed!' without mentioning that speed is of the essence in this particular case, because the court's ruling *has* to be carried out before 6th february this year. Otherwise, the entire part of the law that was deemed unconstitutional would get scrapped automatically and would have to be written up and passed again from ground up (among massive ensuing legislative chaos no doubt).
FASCISM! HOW DARE THEY! A COUP D'ETAT! COMMUNISM AT ITS FINEST! HELP ME MERKEL!
Meanwhile, one of the chief corporate cronies from the opposition, mr Petru, claims:
The government wants to gather 38 million blackmail opportunities with this law. The secret services will be able to view all email now. This is hard even from the opposition's point of view. It means I won't be able to send my future parliamentary speeches via email. There are very bad things going on. Under the guise of terrorism they will be able to introduce an orwellian surveillance network. I ask, why do they even need that at all?
oink oink
