Belarus special services to use key words for eavesdropping

The Operative Analytical Center at the Presidential Administration of Belarus looks like yet another secret service after the president's decree has allowed this center to have complete on-line access the customer databases of the Belarusian mobile communication operators. Earlier, the same center was allowed by the president to regulate the internet.


Mobile communications expert Viktar Dashkevich says that under the new procedures, mobile communications operators must spend their own money in order to buy, install and maintain special equipment for operative and investigative actions. Actually, all this equipment was at operator's possession before.

Viktar Dashkevich: “This equipment has always been installed. It has always provided opportunities to law-enforcement agencies to tape a conversation or to monitor something by key words”.

The special equipment will automatically react to key words and will switch on the recording of your conversation on a mobile phone. For example, if there is a conversation about some terror acts or other issues and threats that require an immediate response from security services, the system will be automatically engaged to tape the conversation and to track down the location of the person talking, says Viktar Dashkevich. This is the essense of this monitring system. Such systems operate almost in every country of the world.

The difference is that before operators had to provide access to the security after a call or a letter from the law-enforcement agencies. Now recording will be switched on and sent to security agencies automatically.

In principle, the decree changes nothing for an ordinary mobile communications service customer. If you wish that your conversation with your lover is not eavesdropped by secret services, do not use phrases like "you are my sexual bomb".

Piotr Miklashevich, the chairman of the Constitutional Court of Belarus, told Euroradio earlier that the amendments to the Law on Operative and Investigative Actions do not confront with the country's Constitution.