This Wednesday, the PCP proposed the creation of a committee to oversee the SIRP, made up of the leaders of parliamentary groups, to assume the functions of the current information system supervisory board.
In a legislative initiative tabled in parliament today, the PCP proposes that this commission be chaired by the President of the Assembly of the Republic and include the presidents of parliamentary groups and the presidents of parliamentary committees on constitutional affairs, rights, freedoms and guarantees sit , National Defense and Foreign Affairs.
In statements to journalists in parliament today, Communist deputy Alma Rivera opined that this commission will allow “real scrutiny” of intelligence services’ performance and “greater scrutiny by the Assembly of the Republic.”
Alma Rivera defended that the SIRP’s current board of trustees “has taken the position of legitimizing the intervention of the intelligence services, rather than assuming the role of oversight on the part of the Assembly of the Republic”.
The deputy also believed that it was not the first time that this supervisory board had “failed to detect illegalities or respond to situations where there is clear abuse or inaccuracy of SIRP activities”.
“We see the Supervisory Board acting as a defender of the intervention and putting itself in the place of the supervised and not the overseer, which greatly limits the understanding of the Assembly of the Republic and the democratic oversight of its intervention,” said he. said.
In the proposal, the PCP also defends the need to “establish clearly the limits of the actions of the information services” by prohibiting the possibility of accessing data obtained through correspondence, telecommunications and other means such as traffic or location data .
The Information System of the Portuguese Republic (SIRP) is in the spotlight after the action of the Security Information Services (SIS) in the case of the alleged theft of a computer by Frederico Pinheiro, former deputy of the Minister of Infrastructure João Galamba.
On May 3, the SIRP oversight board said that the collected elements “do not allow us to conclude” that there was an illegal action by the security information service in recovering the laptop belonging to former deputy of minister João Galamba.
Source: DN
