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Poland’s 2025 Presidential Race: A Referendum on the Government
3 December 2024
20 December 2023
Advanced espionage applications destroy public trust and weaken democracy by tilting the level playing field. Their use in Europe should be limited to narrow cases such as terrorism or organised crime.
As I write this, there is still a dispute between journalists, the EU Council and the European Parliament about the shape of EU regulations regarding surveillance in member states. These are sophisticated spy applications that are able to penetrate our phones unnoticed and download all the content from there: messages (including encrypted ones), photos, calendars of meetings.
On 15 December, EU members reached an agreement: the new law will introduce requirements for media to provide transparency over ownership and it will force national governments to set up an oversight system that guarantees editorial freedom. It also requires checks on mergers and sets up a new European watchdog to oversee it all.