Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions

Security and Protocol Issues: Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission

7:15 pm

Mr. Simon O'Brien:

We have no information that anyone has reported that they have felt they were under surveillance. We have gone with what was detected rather than what could have been detected. We cannot conjecture as to whether something was or was not there on that date. The security sweep was to look for identifiable threats, and these were the identifiable threats it found. It went through a range of other examinations and did not find anything else. The issue, as we have talked about in the past, is about planting things within devices. Nothing we have found here is talking about the planting of a device. Threat one was already our property. It was not about the device but about how it was acting in terms of a potential threat on the phone in my office. It has both an internal and external dimension. There was no issue about anything being placed there. It was on a desk which we use for a lot of things - a lot of teleconferencing - and it has the ability to pick up a wide range of audio from anyone speaking around it. We have found these threats, we have examined what they may mean to us and we have learned from the process.

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