Wiretapping scandal in mayor office of Ózd

Press release – Hungary must brace itself for the most disgusting election campaign so far, says Dávid Janiczak, the Jobbik-delegated mayor of Ózd, after certain unknown individuals have allegedly been wire-tapping his office for several months. The police department of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County has already started to investigate the matter.

In a recent Facebook post, Dávid Janiczak has informed Ózd citizens and the general public that “unknown individuals have been illegally wire-tapping my conversations in the mayor’s office. They recorded the confidential, often emotional and uncontrolled discussions conducted there.” Some of the files were posted online, this is how the mayor was first informed of being wire-tapped.

“The first recorded file of an internal cabinet meeting was posted online on 21 November. Then an individual contacted me and showed me 3-4 more recordings,” Mr Janiczak recalled the events leading him to press charges. This man also told me that he got 8 GBs of wire-tapped recordings from “unknown individuals”, which were made in the Mayor’s office from mid August through mid November.

Recordings may amount to hundreds of hours

To translate the amount of 8 GBs into audio file sizes, we did a quick calculation: the first audio file we randomly looked at was an interview of about 40 minutes in length and took up roughly 20 MBs. Based on this example, the 8 GBs of recordings made in the Ózd mayor’s office may amount to about 266 hours. Suppose if they recorded 10 hours per day for five days a week, the covered period may be as long as a whole month. Of course, if they used a different file format or zipping, it might be considerably longer.

Mr Janiczak found it odd that his mysterious contact “did not want anything from him”, and he also took notice that the recordings he was shown were 16-24 seconds in length only, which means that they may contain no more than fractions of sentences taken out of context, “which in turn are perfectly suitable for distorting the reality and thus feed people’s anger” he added. “There are quite a few topics which we, due to their nature, discuss differently in public or in a friendly conversation,” Mr Janiczak explained. “In the latter case, everybody words it with quite a different passion, ardour and zeal.”
In his view, the fact that the recordings were made in his mayor’s office rather than his home, clearly shows that they want to use the illegally obtained information for political purposes and political attacks.