Czech Health Ministry Secretly Monitored Staff — MPs Demand Answers from Minister Válek

This spring, the Czech Ministry of Health secretly monitored what its employees were doing on their work computers. At a session of the parliamentary health committee, MPs gave Minister Adam Vojtěch (ANO movement) a thorough dressing-down, accusing his ministry of illegally spying on its own staff.

"What happened at the Ministry of Health can only be described as espionage," said Tom Philipp (KDU-ČSL), deputy chair of the committee. According to him, checks on work devices were carried out even outside working hours, and an external contractor may have gained access to employees' sensitive data — precisely the issue staff raised in a collective petition.

Minister Vojtěch insists that the monitoring did not exceed the bounds of the law and was consistent with the Labour Code and established case law. He admitted only to an "administrative error" — the contract with the supplier was not published in the register of contracts on time, as required by law. Earlier, the minister explained that he had deliberately not warned staff in advance, since doing so would have turned the audit into a "Potemkin village," making everything look fine on the surface while the real situation remained unchanged.

A secret contractor and an old scheme

The ministry initially kept both the cost of the surveillance and the identity of the contractor under wraps. It later emerged that the job was carried out by the company Riant, which had conducted a similar audit for the ministry back in 2019. This time, the service cost 753,000 crowns excluding VAT. The contract was never published in the register, as the law requires — the settlement agreement with the contractor, which explicitly states that the work was carried out without a valid contract in place, was only published by the ministry after journalists began asking questions.

"How can we believe this was really just a mistake and that you actually intended to publish the contract? Or did you simply hope it would quietly be forgotten, just like last time?" asked committee deputy chair Zdeňka Němečková Crkvenjaš (ODS).

The 2019 contract was likewise never published — it was signed at the time by Petr Jarema, who then headed the minister's cabinet and now serves as director general of the central affairs section. As previously reported, Jarema confirmed that the failure to disclose the 2019 contract was no accident but a deliberate decision made so that employees would not find out about the audit.

What exactly was being tracked

Minister Vojtěch told MPs that the aim of the audit was to protect the ministry from cyber threats, not to intrude on employees' private lives. He said there was no access to personal correspondence or confidential data belonging to specific staff members — only "passive technical data" was collected: computer names, timestamps, the name of the active application and window, idle time, hardware and software configuration, and login information.

The minister said he would continue to defend the need for such oversight, since the audit revealed that work computers are not always used as intended. As an example, he cited employees who spent up to four hours a day on social media or downloaded videos, including "adult" content. According to Vojtěch, this poses a cyber risk the ministry intends to prevent going forward.

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Source: seznamzpravy.cz