Last year the Moldovan state issued a number of interception warrants that was three times bigger than the number of warrants issued by a country with major terror risks such as the United Kingdom, which is also about 20 times more populous, sic! project remarks in a new article. However, the relevant governmental agencies failed to explain this in any way.
In an analytical paper by the Legal Resources Center, updated in February 2016, the jurists Sorina Macrinici and Vladislav Gribincea describe the wiretapping situation as “deeply alarming” and suggest that “the requests for wiretapping are warranted almost automatically” in our country.
“The wiretapping data trend is concerning”, notes sic! Whereas in 2013 the number of wiretapping warrants issued was 2,915, in 2014 it almost doubled to 5,952 to reach 9,962 last year. Nor MoI, neither Prosecutor Service data show any significant increase in the number of serious crimes reported in this period. “And what exactly changed then,” asks the article?
The article goes on by making a comparison with the situation in the UK. Relative to the respective populations, the British judiciary issues 36.5 interception warrants per million people, and in Moldova there are almost 2,800 warrants per million, or 76 times more.
“Nor the Prosecutor’s Office, neither the Ombudsman’s Office, among other institutions, bothered to explain this indicator or the causes behind the abrupt rise in the number of wiretapping warrants since 2013,” notes sic!
In a broader context, the article asks rhetorically: “And then, how much can we trust the guarantees promised by the state in the other cases (such as the amendments dubbed the Big Brother bill)?”
The article is accompanied by a video clip, which summarizes its content.
The full article can be read on the project’s website sic.md (Romanian).
sic! is an IPN project implemented with the financial support of Soros Foundation Moldova. The goal of sic! is to identify lies, inaccuracies and manipulation in public statements with an impact and to inform the people about them in a simple and accessible way.
