[Infowarrior] - 1984, Hungarian Edition

[Richard Forno]

1984, Hungarian Edition

By PAUL KRUGMAN

June 17, 2013

My Princeton colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, who has been tracking political developments in Hungary, weighs in with the latest, after the jump.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2013/06/17/1984-hungarian-edition/

1984 Redux, Hungarian Edition

The Hungarian parliament recently passed a new national security law that enables the inner circle of the government to spy on people who hold important public offices. Under this law, many government officials must “consent” to being observed in the most intrusive way (phones tapped, homes bugged, email read) for up to two full months each year, except that they won’t know which 60 days they are under surveillance.

Perhaps they will imagine they are under surveillance all of the time. Perhaps that is the point. More than 20 years after Hungary left the world captured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the surveillance state is back.

Now, if the Fidesz government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán finds something it doesn’t like – and there’s no legal limit to what it may find objectionable – those under surveillance can be fired. The people at the very top of the government are largely exempt from surveillance – but this law hits their deputies, staffers and the whole of the security services, some judges, prosecutors, diplomats, and military officers, as well as a number of “independent” offices that Orbán’s administration is not supposed to control.

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Who is now subjected to this surveillance requirement? Here’s the list:

•Hungarian ambassadors and heads of consulates, anywhere in the world.
•Judges and prosecutors who work either with information gathered through secret surveillance or with information that might result in accepting a defendant’s cooperation with the government in exchange for not being prosecuted (plea bargains).
•State commissioners, who are people appointed on an ad hoc basis to manage specific high-level tasks in the government.
•Deputy state secretaries, who are people working directly under government ministers and their state secretaries.
•Heads of the autonomous and self-regulating government agencies, a designation that includes the public procurement office, the office of economic competition, the equal treatment authority, the data protection office, national media council, the financial supervisory authority and the energy and public utilities authority.
•Heads of “government offices,” their deputies and people of equivalent rank, a designation that includes regional offices of the central government, the central statistical office, national atomic energy agency, national office of intellectual property and the national tax and tariff office.
•Senior staff in the Parliament’s central office.
•Senior staff in the office of the President of the Republic.
•The chief of the army, generals and others with equivalent rank.
•All heads of police departments (national, regional and local).
•All heads of state-owned companies.
•All employees of all of the security services, including the new Counter-Terrorism Police (TEK), the new Parliamentary Guard, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (domestic intelligence), the Information Office (foreign intelligence), the National Security Expert Service (signals intelligence), the Military National Security Service, and the internal affairs unit of the police.

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