February 02, 2010, 10:39 CET
Communist-era files recovered to DVD
Informatics experts have been able to recover all information on communist-era secret files stored on tapes and handed them over to the national security authority, a member of the committee overseeing the recovery told a conference in Budapest on Monday.
The 18 tapes contained 40 Megabytes of information which is the equivalent of about 10,000 regular typed pages, Imre Barczi said. He added that the committee of IT experts have transferred all the data onto DVD without looking at the content.
"Decision on their further handling, including whether and in what form they would be made public, lies with the National Security Office," Barczi said.
The tapes were surrounded by much controversy and the government, accused of deliberately stalling publication of the data, has said it would decide by mid-February on disclosure. The tapes are covered by a national secrecy act which can keep the contents under wraps until 2060.
The conference was addressed by experts from other post-communist countries. Stefano Bottoni from Romania, Laszlo Bukovszky from the Czech Republic, Tamas Keszeli from Slovakia and Krzysztof Persak from Poland shared their local examples of handling communist-era files.
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The travesty is that many AVO are getting high retirements while their victims are living in poverty. The Polish people took care of these criminals and reduced their retirements to the minimum. We will know that 65 years of Jewish Communist rule are over when Hungary follows the Polish example.
Would be really interesting to read what kind of info is there.
A friend of mine who emigrated from East to West Germany in summer 1989 (!) told me he was astonished how much info the Stasi had on him and his family. Several hundred pages, many of them supplied by some of his "friends" - of course he never talked to those people again.
He couldn't do anything to them though, not bring them to court - everything they had done had been "legal" - reporting on their best friend ...
Yes, the most any one will get out of it is 'moral right'
No legal ways of 'getting back' at anyone do exist today
Of course there is a theoretic chance to create such laws, but it will be a hard legal process
That a document from an old Secret Service contains some info does not mean anything more than that
To prove that the info was correct and therefore was damaging or to prove that the info was not correct and therefore damaging is equally hard
That different persons are reported to have said this or that about victim X, does not mean that those people actually said those things, just that it was reported in to the Secret Service
In this type of Secret Service organisations with people spying on each other there is a tendency to exaggerate and put in things to look like a 'good spy' and get personal benefits from 'good reports'
But for victim X it is probably not pleasant to read especially as one can discover his/her spouse been reporting, or relatives or bests friends...
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So what will it mean that we will now be able to maybe read what the Fidesz/MIEP/Jobbik leadership reported on their friends?
Some of them are over 40 years old and that age they could have done something
It should be mentioned that most of the Stasi info is only available "for legitimate scientific research" (whatever that means) or to the people for whom the file was established - even then some parts are blackened ...