Anyone can fall victim to unlawful surveillance, citizens, politicians - Supreme Audit Office President Marian Banaś said on Tuesday at a session of Senate extraordinary committee investigating reported cases of Pegasus software use. "I believe I've fallen victim to unlawful surveillance," he stressed. He added that the request to lift of his immunity included quotes from messages from his private email account.
Banaś was one of the guests invited to Tuesday's session of the Senate extraordinary committee investigating reports of illegal use of Pegasus surveillance software. At one point, he declared he wished to give a statement.
"Current Polish legal and organisational solutions regarding supervision and control over special services do not guarantee that potential irregularities in their functioning will be effectively detected and corrected. A key area of state functioning, related to ensuring safety of the citizens, as well as directly connected to respecting citizens' constitutional and fundamental rights and freedoms, has been virtually left at the discretion of people in charge of particular services," Banaś said.
He also argued that "under current legal situation, chiefs of individual special services decide about the flow of information and the scope of actual supervision and control over the said services, which from the point of view of functioning of a democratic state is unacceptable".
Banaś: quotes from my private email account
Banaś also said that "under the current legal and factual situation anyone can become a victim of illegal surveillance, citizens, politicians".
"One example of using materials gathered with the use of unlawful surveillance is the request to lift my immunity, which soon will be examined by the Sejm Rules and Deputies' Affairs Committee. Even though I still hold immunity, the said request includes tendentiously quoted fragments of messages from my private email account," he stressed.
"I think that I have indeed fallen victim to unlawful surveillance," he said.
He added that "the first such situation after 1989 took place in 2017". "When my flat was under renovation, the National Revenue Administration officers noticed spotted wires that could have been potentially used to listen what was going on in my flat," he said.
"The other such incident happened in 2018, when an attempt to hack my private phone was made to gain access to what was stored in it. Obviously, I had this phone completely destroyed, and my IT specialists from the National Revenue Administration confirmed that beyond any doubt special services had been behind the hacking attempt," Marian Banaś said.
Źródło: TVN24 News in English, TVN24