A conversation with Jasna Koteska on surveillance in Macedonia. Privacy International, London (2016)
A
conversation with Jasna Koteska on state relations and surveillance in
Macedonia.
This
is a guest post by Jasna Koteska. Read Privacy International’s
full report documenting stories of mass surveillance in Macedonia here.
What are the main similarities and differences between
modern surveillance methods in Macedonia and those of the socialist period?
In all 46 years of communist Macedonia, the total
official number of personal communist surveillance files is 14,572. Unofficial
sources report more than 50,000 files. The number of direct ‘snitches’ in
communist Macedonia was estimated between 12,000 and 40,000. In the present
mass surveillance scandal, between 20,000 and 26,000 people were secretly
wiretapped in the period of just several years since 2007.
Yugoslavia was a soft regime, but it was nonetheless
built around subtle permanent political censorship. Prohibition was performed
via the mechanisms of threat, and not as direct conflict. The bureaucratic
apparatus in Yugoslavia was far more chaotic and far less thought through than
is commonly believed. Much/all depended on the local small-town interpretations
of the ideology. The ideological-police nomenclature of Yugoslavia
functioned in such a way that people were object and a target of the State, you
had to know how to represent your socialist ideology, and the entire small town
mentality was used to evaluate the ones who seemed suspicious.
In the present mass scale surveillance, the
conversations reveal huge misuse of state power by the top government
officials, everything: from elaborate electoral fraud schemes, taking bribes,
blackmailing businesses, taking control over most of TV and printed media,
imprisoning political opponents, exercising control over the judiciary system,
allegedly gaining massive financial benefits, etc.
What is unique about the present mass surveillance
scandal in Macedonia, for me, is that here the one displaying the wiretapped
material is not a journalist (like Assange of Wikileaks), or an intelligence
officer (like whistleblowers Chelsey Manning, Edward Snowden), but a top
politician, a leader of the opposition.
With regard to surveillance, are Macedonia’s current
politicians influenced by the techniques and policies practiced by the
communist party when Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia?
The budget of the Macedonian Administration for Security
and Counter Intelligence (UBK), which operates within the Ministry of Interior,
increased by 60 times in 2008. The previous year, the annual budget
was around € 400,000, and in 2008 it was increased to a whopping 25 million
euros. Anyone who remotely follows these issues could have predicted that mass
scale surveillance was about to happen.
Someone told me that today’s Macedonian informers are
recruited from within powerful intelligence families and networks. It
guaranteed the continuation of the state secrets services and made them intact.
I am not sure if this makes sense. However, the longest standing chief of
secret services, Saso Mijalkov, the Director of Administration for Security and
Counterintelligence from 2006 to May 2015, also a first cousin of Prime
Minister, was a son of the former minister of interior.
But generally, it is unimportant to have a huge number
of actual informers on the field, since technology is already much better
developed.
How has the experience of Yugoslavia shaped people’s
understanding of individual privacy in the Balkans and their relationship to
the State?
In Yugoslavia, surveillance was directed towards
everybody: generally everybody could have become a target. […]Approximately
half a million Yugoslavs were watched by the secret services. The files were
produced by the informants, who were paid, while the small-town snitches did
not join the Yugoslav secret police by completing an application form (as was
the case of the Eastern German Stasi), they worked on the basis of their word
of honour, for little money, and out of patriotism.
People regarded the intrusion into their privacy as a
way of how the society functions.Yugoslavia was a “society without
consequences”, as most of the socialist countries, actions were not always
followed by legal or public judgment, and the people learned that it is enough
to be in an anaesthetized relationship towards the regime in order to
survive.[…]
People learnt that they depend on the state powers. The
public’s attitude was generally submissive and they expected that the state and
its technocrats would dictate solutions, including regarding people’s privacy.
This is also part of the reason, I believe, why Skopje 2014 [the government
project to erect nationalist monuments] and the general nationalistic ideology
was implemented without much of a struggle.
Is surveillance worse now because of new technology or
during one-party rule in Yugoslavia?
It is different. The status of privacy is different. I
see at least three shifts in the status of privacy in the past two decades.
When the first bulletin board system arrived in
Macedonia in the mid-1990s, it was somewhat of a general principle to protect
your privacy.
The second shift was introduced with social networks
when it became a common habit that people voluntarily shared their data as part
of the desired identity. Liberal capitalism turned homes into public spaces,
forcing people to put on cameras into their houses so that privacy is attacked
at the very place where it is created. Unlike the naive communist attempts to
physically destroy the home and bring people outside (public dining halls,
kindergartens, worker’s summer resorts, sport halls), capitalism succeeded by
doing so ideologically. If someone does not put me under a magnifying glass, I
shall personally place a camera and broadcast myself on the Internet 24/7.
The third shift is maybe something that is being shaped
nowadays. My son, who is12, and his friends who belong to online gaming
communities, find the idea of the anonymous much more attractive. They see some
power in alias, in anonymity, and are trying to carefully isolate their online
identities from the offline. I am sure they are not choosing this consciously,
they are too young, so it might be the next pending trend.
Some of my radical leftist friends find it important
that all the records of this current surveillance scandal be made public,
stating that no privacy should be protected. As a public supporter of Wikileaks
I am not sure what is smart. I can only imagine that the recordings contain the
whole real-politics of the country in the past several years and they are a
possible weapon to control society.
But again — maybe dumping the surveillance data online
will create a situation where no one will profit from them, in the political
sense. Which is good, but it exactly affects the individual privacy: not that
of the top officials, but of journalists, activists, or precisely of accidental
people who happened to be recorded.
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