Former Polish justice minister arrested in sprawling spyware probe | The Record

Polish police on Friday arrested the country’s former justice minister, alleging that he signed off on the use of government money to pay for spyware used to snoop on opposition leaders and supervised cases where the technology was deployed.

The arrest of Zbigniew Ziobro — who was justice minister from 2015 to 2023 — follows the arrest earlier this week of the country’s former Internal Security Agency chief Piotr Pogonowski, according to local news reports.

The previous government in Poland has been…interesting.

If anything, this proves how official governmental restrictions does not mean much. Criminals will break laws regardless of their position.

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Privacy or security through policy isn’t real privacy or security at all. The only way to ensure either is through technological guarantees.

Glad he got what was coming to him. Hopefully this will lead to a more sensible attitude against spyware.

Technology alone cannot solve a sociopolitical problem. Policy is the only final guarantee. Signal can secure your communications, it cannot prevent government from torturing the signal pin out of you.

Any technical problem of sufficient scope is a sociopolitical problem.

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But policy can? You realise the government breaks the law all the time. Ever heard of a little place called Guantanamo Bay?

Is this how moderators respond in this forum by default? Sarcasm and exaggerations? I won’t usually deign that with a response.

And policy can. No tech would have saved you from Japanese internment camps, only policy pressure would have. Policy restricted warrantless surveillance, not tech.

It is delusional to the extreme to think any tech will save you from policy that persecutes.

Also Guantanamo bay is a policy outcome. Not sure what point you made. If public could pressure a policy change, the prison would close.

Read this if you ever wish to break your delusion: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/policy_vs_techn.html

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It isn’t either or. Tech+Policy (& implementation to enforce said policies) must go hand-in-hand. Otherwise, it is a losing battle.

Govts and its institutions are more adept at making things that they need all legal, retrospectively, reactively, proactively, covertly, tacitly, blatantly. But, that’s a different conversation.


Power corrupts.

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I’m allowed to express my personal opinions including with the occasional sarcasm if that’s what you mean? My views are my own.

What happens most of the time is that the government does an illegal thing and eventually a court finds it illegal and only then the government passes a new law to maintain the status quo.

I agree that a solution goes beyond technological solutions and includes policy. But it feels to me that right now most of the guarantees are a matter of policy.