Minister Gordana Jankuloska, whose talks with her counterpart from the Ministry of Finance, Zoran Stavreski, were commonly heard at the press conferences of opposition leader Zoran Zaev, hasn’t changed her numbers, or phones, and there is no change in any daily communication over the telephone, said (over the telephone!) Assistant Minister for Public Relations Ivo Kotevski, who is also one of the bugged people.
– We cannot stop telephone communication. Minister still uses the same phone numbers, but she occasionally changes the models of mobile phones – says Kotevski for META.
From the last audio recordings that were released yesterday, in part of one of the recorded conversations with Stavreski, you can hear that Jankuloska uses or used a model of iPhone.
SDSM candidate for president in the last presidential election Stevo Pendarovski said that he uses BlackBerry Samsung and that he hasn’t changed the phone number after the scandal.
– I change the number if the faculty I work in changes the operator. In the period for which I have information that I was tapped, I changed my number once, but it was “caught” all the same – says Pendarovski for META.
What numbers and models of phones are now used by the head of state, officials in the Government, the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and the Ministry of Finance?
We asked whether the revealing of the scandal and the publication of phone conversations in public led to changing systems and ways of communication, i.e. whether top state officials have changed their mobile devices and the numbers that they used so far? Have they kept the old ones or published recordings of telephone calls and monitoring of their communication changed something and how this scandal affects the daily routine communication in state institutions and between ministers?
We have not received any answer to the questions from the Office of the President though we sent them five days ago. There is still no response from the others as well.
Unlike us, the discovery of the scandal (from former officer of the National Security Agency US (NSA), Edward Snowden) that the agency for years has been tapping the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the media wrote that the Chancellor is a great enthusiast when it comes to communication over the cellular network. Because of this, her immediate associates gave her the nickname “die Handy-Kanzlerin” (“Handy” is a German word for mobile phone).
London “Guardian” then wrote, citing 2009 news reports, that she equipped her phone with encryption chip so it cannot be tapped. Reportedly, another 5,250 other ministers, advisors and important public servants were equipped with identical encryption technology.
One of the first questions that Merkel was asked after the discovery of the scandal was if she changed the phone number and the device? The answer was, “No, I didn’t.”
Asked how they will communicate with German Chancellor at the 2008 EU Summit in Brussels, French President Francois Hollande said: “We will ring the mobile phones and write SMS messages.”
