Agnieszka Kublik: Stay alert while in a hotel bathroom! This is not a hitchcock movie, this is Kaczyński’s Poland

The first report of the Commission investigating Russian influence is to be presented just before the elections, which for Kaczyński are the battle of his life.

The Law and Justice party will watch you in a hotel bathroom, wiretap you using the Pegasus spyware system, at home and on the street, and the McCarthy commission – ekhem, pardon me –  the Kaczyński’s commission will convict you of just about anything. No, I’m not fantasising, I’m describing the reality. Wherever you are, whatever you do and with whomever you do it, they see you and they hear you. They know.

In a bed with Kaczyński, in the shower with Kaczyński

The week started with a new, shocking scandal of this government. Well, it is all about hotels operated by the Polish Hotel Holding, in which special services keep surveillance on guests. This is big. The Polish Hotel Holding manages both local hotels located in smaller towns, frequented by local government officials on business trips, families on holiday, small businessmen on the go, as well as high-profile hotels such as Marriott International, Hilton International, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, InterContinental Hotels Group and Louvre Hotels Group.

The Polish Hotel Holding (PHH) is a state-owned company and its President Gheorghe Marian Cristescu is friends with Joachim Brudzinski. The same Joachim Brudzinski who takes Jarosław Kaczyński on holiday every year. Cristescu is therefore not just some hotelier. He has been awarded the Cross of Merit by the President Duda and received the Freedom of Speech Award from the regime’s daily ‘Gazeta Polska Codziennie’.

The Law and Justice party does not, of course, follow all the guests in those hotels, but only those targeted by the ruling party. One of their targets is the opposition and their meeting with the leader of democratic, anti-Lukashenko Belarus, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. They have been  recorded by the special services and by the hotel staff, hand in hand.

The hotel staff and the special services were purportedly collecting compromising material against Bartosz Kramek, an opposition activist and one of the leaders of the Open Dialogue Foundation. The collected information pertained to his banking operations and involved a potential search of his hotel room. A ‘sanitary physician’, i.e. a bug, was allegedly in place and surveillance was conducted by special services.

No one can ever feel safe in these hotels again. What about other places?

Well, the special services still have Pegasus, a super electronic surveillance spyware, theoretically developed to combat terrorists. In our country, the authorities considered the opposition to be worthy of such name and wiretapped, for example, Krzysztof Brejza when he was the head of the Civil Platform (PO) election campaign staff. They wiretapped the prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek and Roman Giertych, a lawyer known for taking up cases which involve scandals of Law and Justice.

Pegasus is quite a smart system. It installs itself on the victim’s device when, for example, a user clicks on a special, seemingly innocuous link. It operates in phones using Android and iOS systems. That is, on virtually all phones.

Pegasus is quite a heavy-duty system. It takes total control of the infected device and can extract anything: photos, videos, emails, text messages, contacts. It can track the location, record the audio and video of the smartphone’s surroundings, wiretap into encrypted audio transmissions and read encrypted messages from a variety of apps.

It is quite a devious system, too. It has a self-destruct mode which is activated when the victim’s device has not communicated with Pegasus command-and-control server for a prolonged period of time or when a risk of unmasking occurs.

In Poland, Pegasus had been active since November 2017. Citizen Lab detected the spyware on nationwide networks of Polkomtel, Orange Polska, T-Mobile Polska, Vectra and Netia, however, also local internet providers such as Fiberlink and Prosat have not been not immune to it either. No one with a phone operating  in these networks can ever feel safe again. What about other networks?

To-Get-Rid-of-Tusk Commission

I believe that the State Commission for investigating Russian influence on the internal security of the Republic of Poland during the 2007-2022 period falls into the same category of state actions directed against citizens. The Sejm has just voted on the establishment of this Commission.

This body is unprecedented; it’s task is to press charges, conduct trials and give convictions. It will be composed of politicians appointed by the parliamentary majority, and the head of the commission will be appointed by the Prime Minister.

The commission has been accorded enormous powers, such as an unlimited access to all investigations, contracts, company secrets, phone calls and emails. It will be able to request any document from any authorities; it will have the power to order a prosecutor to conduct a search and have operational control. It will be able to request the annulment of secrecy and privileges, such as lawyer-client or doctor-patient privilege, or journalist source confidentiality.

The commission can impose horrendous penalties, such as revocation of an administrative decision issued as a result of Russian influence, issuing of a ban on performing functions related to management of public funds for up to 10 years, and revocation and ban on security clearance for 10 years.

Failure to stand before a Commission will carry a fine of up to PLN 20 000, and another up to PLN 50 000 for a successive non-appearance. There will be no appeal against the Commission’s decisions, yet members of the Commission will not be held accountable for anything. According to the Act of Parliament, neither the chairman nor members of the Commission can be held liable for their activities in the Commission (there can be no civil, administrative, criminal or compensatory liability).

Last but not least, the Commission’s first report is to be presented on 17 September, that is on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It is roughly a month before the elections, which for Jarosław Kaczyński are a last stand.

Should he lose, he will lose everything, that is his honour and his freedom.

Should he win, he will take away honour and freedom from all his opponents.

This election campaign will be neither fair nor honourable. Never before after 1989 has the ruling party had so many tools to destroy others. And never before has it used them so willingly and eagerly.

Source: wyborcza.pl

Artykuł Agnieszka Kublik: Stay alert while in a hotel bathroom! This is not a hitchcock movie, this is Kaczyński’s Poland pochodzi z serwisu Open Dialogue Foundation.