Szekely, Ivan --- "Hungary" [2008] ELECD 402; in Rule, B. James (ed), "Global Privacy Protection" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Global Privacy Protection

Editor(s): Rule, B. James

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848440630

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Hungary

Author(s): Szekely, Ivan

Number of pages: 33

Extract:

6. Hungary
Ivan Szekely
Constitutional democracy had barely triumphed in Hungary when, in January
1990, the scandal called `Budapest Watergate', better known to Hungarians as
`Duna-gate', broke out. (Duna is the Hungarian name for the Danube, widely
regarded as the great national river of the country.) What happened was that
activists belonging to certain new political parties, who used to be called
`dissenters' during the not-so-distant days of the overthrown regime, now
clandestinely entered the offices of the internal security agencies, and filmed
what they found there during the night. The footage presented at a press
conference proved that the infamous `III/III Division', which kept the `inter-
nal enemies' of the communist regime under surveillance, had actually
survived the symbolic date of the democratic turn (23 October 1989), and
continued tapping the phone lines of new party leaders and activists, keeping
their private lives under surveillance and preparing reports on the information
thus collected.
Although several commentators later suggested that this was nothing but
the aimless and dysfunctional reflex of an apparatus left to its own devices
after the collapse of the political system that had created and employed it, the
scandal was hyped up by the printed and electronic media, which contributed
in good measure to the devastating defeat of the successors of the single party
in the free elections that took place a few months later. (The surviving reform-
communist party received only 10 per cent of the votes, the new democratic
parties about ...