The leaking of photographs of activist Nikola Ristic from surveillance cameras at the Belgrade airport to the tabloids revealed that the airport provided access to this surveillance without any agreements and rules to an “unlimited number of people”, Byrne writes.
MUP, Border Police, BIA, Customs Administration – these are state institutions from which an “unlimited” number of employees could access the surveillance cameras of the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade.
This is the finding of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Protection of Personal Data, who initiated the procedure of extraordinary inspection of the Ministry of Interior of Serbia, and then the company Belgrade Airport, since the photos of the 29-year-old activist Nikola Ristic from airport surveillance cameras ended up in Informer in November 2024.
The photos were published only a few days after the fall of the canopy at the train station in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, and mass protests began across the country, in which Ristić also participated. Byrne writes.
Because the data “about the personality of Nikola Ristić was made available to an unlimited number of natural persons”, the Commissioner could not establish who forwarded the photos to the Informer, nor whether employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did it, writes the Commissioner’s answer to BIRN’s questions about this case.
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The supervision procedure according to the MUP was completed without the imposition of measures, and the extraordinary inspection supervision of the Belgrade Airport company showed that this company did not undertake “adequate organizational, technical and personnel measures to protect personal data from the video surveillance system at the Airport”.
At that time, the airport did not have signed agreements governing the access of police, customs or BIA airport video surveillance employees with any of these institutions.
The commissioner issued a warning to the airport and ordered the company to sign the agreements in May of last year, and by the beginning of April – almost a year later – Belgrade Airport informed the commissioner’s office that the agreement was signed only with BIA.
The French company Vinci, which owns Belgrade Airport, did not respond to BIRN’s questions.
The Belgrade Airport company briefly replied that all agreements had been signed, but did not specify when or if the company had implemented any internal procedure to determine how the law was violated and ensure that similar problems do not recur.
“The contracts that are the subject of your interest have been signed. The Belgrade Airport company strictly adheres to all regulations in its operations,” he wrote in the reply to BIRN.
The Personal Data Protection Act, however, decisively states that those who process personal data – in this case the company Belgrade Airport, but also the Ministry of Interior, the Customs Administration and the BIA – are obliged to ensure that “personal data cannot be made available to an unlimited number of natural persons”.
The law further states that if the data is processed by several handlers, they must sign an agreement and transparently determine the responsibility of each of them, as well as prescribe appropriate “technical, organizational and personnel measures in order to reach an appropriate level of data security”.
Although their employees also had access to the video surveillance of the airport, the BIA and the Customs Administration were not subject to inspections by the Commissioner in this case.
Law
According to the Criminal Code, disclosure or misuse of legally collected personal data is punishable by up to three years in prison.
“Honestly, I saw the whole mess by which the Commissioner established that we can only know with certainty for the airport that he is objectively responsible in this situation, as a classic defense of the system – in the sense, we will now blame everything on a company that is mostly owned by a French company, and with that we will actually protect our security services, that is, the MUP and the BIU.”
“But on the other hand, just because we got to the point where the Commissioner now ordered that they have to conclude those contracts, I feel a little good, because practically we got to the point – this attack on me – to force the institutions to do what they need to do and that in the future [something like that] could not happen without consequences,” Nikola Ristić told BIRN.
Photo leaks and lawsuits against Informer
Along with photos of Ristic moving through the airport, Informer published a text insinuating that Ristic went abroad for instructions.
As BIRN previously wrote in the text “Protests in Serbia: How and why information about critics of the regime leaks into the tabloids“, placing disinformation and personal data in the tabloids is part of a deliberately designed and systematic mechanism of intimidation and discrediting of those who the ruling progressives perceive as opponents.
Due to the publication of the photos and text, Ristić sued the TV, online and print edition of Informer.
The High Court in Belgrade passed first-instance verdicts in two proceedings and ordered Informer to pay compensation to Ristica for breach of privacy and reputation and honor and to remove the text from the portal. The informant filed an appeal and a final verdict in this procedure is awaited.
“What is happening with the surveillance systems is very dangerous and that is what I get the main impression from this whole story – that practically our institutions do not set up security systems in such a way that they work for the benefit of the citizens, but specifically so that the citizens would be monitored and a very controlled atmosphere would be created in which you cannot even travel somewhere without it ending up in the tabloids,” says Ristic.
He adds that in this case it is particularly worrying that the photos from the airport ended up in the tabloid.
“It’s an international airport through which hundreds of thousands of passengers pass. If information about citizens can be leaked at that place, especially if it’s videos, photos and the like, it’s not just a local scandal, it’s an international scandal, and if such a place is protected at the highest possible level, then what can we expect to happen with the recordings from the cameras of some intersection or in front of some other institution? So I’m honestly worried about how much they abuse the surveillance system,” concludes Ristic.
Source: Vreme
