Surveillance States: Monitoring of Journalists Goes Unchecked in Central, South-East Europe

Some journalists who have been tapped, bugged and followed told BIRN that they now take greater precautions to avoid being monitored, particularly considering the increasing sophistication of electronic surveillance.

Koukakis said he uses encrypted apps on his phone and tries to meet contacts face-to-face, if he can.

“And, of course, my cellphone is checked regularly to see whether it is free of spyware or not,” he added.

Bartosz Węglarczyk, editor-in-chief of ONET, Poland’s largest online news platform, who was put under surveillance in the late 2000s, said his media company employs digital security professionals to protect journalists from surveillance, working under the supposition that it could happen again at any time.

“We know it’s happening. So that’s how we act,” Weglarczyk said.

At Aktuality in Slovakia, Laura Kellöová expressed a similar view: “I always have to assume that someone might be listening in or watching me and has an interest in finding out who I’m communicating with, what I’m working on, who I’m talking to and who my sources are.”

Kellöová said that after the murder of Ján Kuciak, Aktuality’s journalists “communicate almost exclusively through encrypted applications, not through regular phone lines”.

But some European countries have considered expanding their security services’ surveillance powers since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in reaction to perceived threats from Russian espionage.

In Poland, a draft law on electronic communications intended to give the security services access to any material sent or received by email or other online communication tools is awaiting approval from parliament.

Simultaneously, the European Union is exploring the possibility of restricting digital surveillance with the proposed European Media Freedom Act, the first ever regulation of media freedom at EU level, which is currently in the process of adoption.

However, based on the draft legislation and the European Council’s position on the law, it appears that this opportunity to curb digital surveillance is likely to be missed and the situation may actually become worse.

Gutierrez explained that, following intervention by France, the draft legislation has been changed to allow surveillance of journalists, if there is a “need for the state to ensure national security”.

The EFJ is worried about the possible “abusive use of this concept of national security to impose surveillance, to spy on journalists”, he said.

“It’s a kind of legalisation of spying on journalists for any reason because, you know, anything can be interpreted as a national security issue; it’s vague, so it’s easy for states to try to justify that kind of thing,” he warned.

Many of the journalists and experts who spoke to BIRN were convinced that, despite the cases that have been exposed and the subsequent legal challenges, the monitoring of reporters continues across Central and South-East Europe.

Saška Cvetkovska, editor-in-chief of the Investigative Reporting Lab in North Macedonia, noted that despite ongoing prosecutions of former officials for the mass surveillance scheme that was uncovered in 2015, material apparently obtained by wiretapping continues to be published.

“Daily, non-stop, from 2015 to today, unauthorised recorded conversations of presidents of political parties, businessmen, MPs and journalists have been appearing on various [online] platforms and in the media,” Cvetkovska said.

Hungarian investigative reporter Szabolcs Panyi, who discovered that he was being monitored with Pegasus spyware, said he also believes that surveillance is more widespread than so far revealed – and that the way the authorities and the general public have responded to reports that journalists have been monitored is also concerning.

“The whole reaction of the Hungarian state doesn’t show that they take the privacy, legal and human rights concerns that come up in this kind of surveillance seriously, but try to sweep it all off the table as a political scandal,” Panyi said.

“And the very, very sad thing is that I don’t see that Hungarian public opinion, Hungarian society itself, is showing any particular resistance when confronted with information that the Hungarian state can monitor anyone at any time.”

The interviews for this article were conducted by Claudia Ciobanu, Katarína Kozinková, Delia Marinescu, Sinisa Jakov Marušić, Eleni Stamatoukou, Milica Stojanović and Zita Szopkó.

See all the interviews for BIRN’s Surveillance States project, which examines the monitoring of journalists in 15 countries in Central and South-East Europe, on our special focus page.

NOTE: This article was amended on September 18, 2023 to clarify that there was a final court verdict in one surveillance-related case.