The past entry and registration procedure in the offices of the State Attorney General’s Office and the Headquarters of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Madrid, as the instructor ordered the intervention of all those computer devices, objects, documents and other effects that could be related to the crime of revealing secrets that is being investigated, including the mobile phones of the owners of both institutions.
In this way, to investigate an alleged crime attributed to the natural persons holding the General Prosecutor’s Office and the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Madrid, it was agreed to intervene in the computer terminals and emails, from March 8, 2024 until the date of the entry and registration (eight months), in reality of the institutions that they command; In these emails and files, reserved or secret information is centralized from the different prosecutor’s offices throughout the State, including the special prosecutor’s offices and the National Court.
Last Friday, he decided, as has been reported in the press, that “limiting the expert analysis of the intervened material to the events and people under investigation, it is limited to the dates that cover March 8 to 14, 2024, both days inclusive”.
It is said that rectification is wise, but it happens that, in certain situations, wisdom, or at least prudence, must be present from the beginning, since the opposite can lead to devastating consequences. As we believe it has happened.
In the intervened devices whose legal character is reserved or secret. They are mainly emails, reports and documents related to, on the one hand, investigative proceedings, of a preliminary nature, directed by the Prosecutor’s Office and dependent exclusively on it and not subject to any judicial control. Which means that, by definition, no judge has the right to know its object or content. On the other hand, they are investigation proceedings for an indeterminate number of judicial cases, some protected by the secrecy of art. 302 Law of Criminal Procedure. Nor should any judge other than the competent one know either the object or the content.
Logically, to look for a needle in a haystack it is impossible not to expose the straw. What happens is that, in this case, the straw contains information related to cases and people who have nothing to do with the needle being sought and whose knowledge, due to the cloning of the devices, has already transcended the circle of people who can legally have access. And for these purposes, the subsequent limitation is indifferent, since the data is already captured and there is no technical mechanism that ensures that it is not exposed.
All knowledge of said data is prohibited to the investigator of the case, as it is not the object of his investigation. But the UCO, which is organically dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, is also prohibited.
The analysis of all these files and emails means knowing about actions of a very sensitive nature that, due to their number and severity, entail interference in the work of the prosecutors and the fundamental rights of the affected people – without ruling out the risk, even , for the security of the State—, as has never happened until now in democracy.
The subsequent delimitation of the temporal scope under investigation only recognizes the lack of reflection with which the measure was adopted and the lack of adequate weighting of the interests at stake, thus demonstrating the absolute breakdown of the principle of proportionality of the resolution, But, as said, the damage has already been done and there are no guarantees that the information corresponding to the unlimited period will be deleted or destroyed.
The Prosecutor’s Office, from the heart of the proceedings opened for this matter, must guarantee the function of the Prosecutor’s Office as an institution that those actions that are legally secret, continue to be so to guarantee their effectiveness. The intervention ordered by the investigating magistrate, carried out with a few minutes’ notice to the Prosecutor’s Office, thereby prevented it from exercising its function of controlling this measure that massively affects fundamental rights.
This is why we understand that the practice of opening and analyzing seized files and emails must be suspended. The instructor should not carry it out due to the impossibility of guaranteeing the security mechanisms that the scope and importance of the content of these files and emails require. The appropriate party will be responsible for the dissemination of any information contained in the cloned files, but, of course, not the Prosecutor’s Office.
