Romanian Intelligence Service The Romanian Intelligence Service ( , abbreviated SRI ) is Romania ' s domestic intelligence service . Its role is to gather information relevant to national security and hand it over to relevant institutions , such as Ministry of National Defense . The institution is authorized to intercept phone calls or any other form of telecommunication or radio wave s . The agency ( or any agents on its behalf ) are not entitled to any inquiry or official investigation . The Romanian Intelligence Service has its own university , " Institutul Național de Informații " . History . Creation . Throughout the Communist era , the Securitate was the political police that was involved in repressing dissent . During the 1989 Romanian Revolution , soon after taking power , Ion Iliescu signed the decree which integrated the Securitate into the Ministry of Defense , thus bringing it under his control . Iulian Vlad , the head of the Securitate , together with some of his deputies , were arrested on December 31 , 1989 ; Iliescu named Gelu Voican Voiculescu as the new head of the Securitate . Voiculescu assured the Securitate agents that he does not intent to wage a war against individual Securitate officers and , by mid - January 1990 , the Securitate officers continued their activity in their old headquarters . The press was informed ( but not allowed to verify ) that the equipment for tapping phones has been decommissioned . The Romanian Intelligence Service was officially created on March 26 , 1990 , taking over the buildings , staff , equipment and virtually everything that belonged to the Securitate . Its creation occurred only a few days following the ethnic clashes of Târgu Mureș , being quickly created through a decree , its first director being Virgil Măgureanu . Securitate archives . SRI inherited Securitate ' s archives and it has been accused of destroying parts of it or supplying sensitive parts to certain politicians . On June 22 , 1990 , SRI officers unloaded a truck full of Securitate documents in a forest in Berevoești , Argeș County , after which they buried them with soil . The documents intended to be destroyed were discovered by locals and , a year later , a group of journalists began digging the decaying documents and the " România Liberă " newspaper published several of them , including information on dissidents , being not only Securitate , but also of the newly created SRI . This led to the adoption of a law on state secrets , which banned publication of any SRI documents . It was only in 2005 that the archives of the Securitate began to be transferred to an outside institution ( CNSAS ) with a first batch containing two - thirds of the total number of documents . The goal was to transfer all Securitate documents which " do not affect national security " . Involvement in the Mineriad . The extent of the involvement of the Romanian Intelligence Service in the violent repression of the 1990 anti - government protests has been a matter of debate . On June 12 , 1990 , the government decided that the Police and Army , in collaboration with the Intelligence Service , evacuate the protesters of University Square . During the violence that followed , the protesters attacked the headquarters of the Romanian Intelligence Service with rocks and Molotov cocktail s . The following days , miners brought by the government from the Jiu Valley violently repressed the protesters ( killing several people and wounding thousands ) and destroyed the opposition parties ' headquarters . According to a letter to President Iliescu drafted by then - Prime Minister Petre Roman , the whole repression was organized by the secret services under the leadership of Virgil Măgureanu using the network of the Securitate . This view is supported by military prosecutor Dan Voinea , who said that all the miner groups were escorted by police and SRI agents who led them to the headquarters of parties and NGOs . During the 2000s , Virgil Măgureanu , the head of the SRI at the time , has been investigated by prosecutors ( together with other leaders including President Ion Iliescu ) for several counts including genocide and torture , however they decided in 2009 not to charge him with any crime . Phone tapping . In 1996 , a former SRI employee , Constantin Bucur was the whistleblower who alerted the media that the Romanian Intelligence Service was performing illegal phone tappings of politicians , journalists and other public figures . Bucur was convicted for revealing top secret information , but he won a trial against the Romanian state after appealing at the European Court of Human Rights . Mircea Toma , one of the journalists whose phone had been tapped also sued the Romanian state for wiretapping and preserving private conversations with his daughter , Sorana . He also won a compensation the disrespect of the Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights . The Romanian Intelligence Service refused to collaborate with the European Court of Human Rights , arguing that its documents are state secrets . The president of the Group of Political Investigations ( a Romanian organization that independently monitors the activity of state agencies ) , Mugur Ciuvică , has stated that he has evidence of ongoing illegal phone tappings . According to Ilie Botoș , the Attorney General of Romania , between 1991 and 2003 the phones of 20 , 000 people have been tapped . Between 1991 and 2002 , a number of 14 , 000 authorizations were given by the government for national security - related issues . Between 1996 and 2003 further 5500 authorizations were given related to organized and white - collar crime ; out of these 5500 suspects , only 238 were convicted . For the year 2005 , a number of 6370 phones belonging to 2373 people were tapped , the average tapping being of 220 days . In 2006 , a new illegal wiretapping scandal erupted after transcripts of businessman Dinu Patriciu ' s phone discussions with his associates were leaked to the press . Patriciu sued the Intelligence Service and won a compensation of 50 , 000 lei in 2011 . A further case of potentially illegal wiretappings is the one of European Court of Human Rights judge Corneliu Bîrsan , whose wiretappings under the guise of " national security " are now being investigated by a parliamentary commission created by the Romanian Senate on April 8 , 2013 . Relationship with the press . The Romanian Intelligence Service had an uneasy relationship with the press , which it monitored , infiltrated and accused of being a national security liability . In 2010 , " the press " has been included in the list of national vulnerabilities in the " National Strategy for the Defence of the Country " . An early controversy occurred in 1996 , when Tana Ardeleanu ( a journalist for " Ziua " who had published some articles about President Ion Iliescu ) had been shadowed by SRI agents . Amid press anger , SRI director Virgil Măgureanu admitted that SRI agents followed Ardeleanu and argued that the surveillance was a " mistake " and that the agents thought they were following two suspected spies . The existence of infiltrated SRI agents in the press has been publicly known since 2006 , when the press officer of SRI claimed that the Service has always had moles in the Romanian press arguing that it ' s not illegal . This claim has been quite controversial , as , according to Cristian Tudor Popescu , journalists are not a threat to national security and , according to historian Marius Oprea , this leads to suspicions about whether the SRI has political police activities . The " Jurnalul Național " newspaper fired its editor - in - chief , Valentin Zaschievici , in August 2012 , accusing him of being an infiltrated SRI agent , following the leak of some SRI documents by " Cotidianul " . The Romanian Intelligence Service admitted that the documents were indeed genuine , but it claimed that their agent was only monitoring the leaking of secret documents to the press . In 2013 , George Maior , the Director of the Service , accused the press of organizing an attack campaign against the Romanian Intelligence Service , giving as example the investigations over the illegal CIA prisons in Bucharest ( Bright Light ) , which he argued that is exposing Romania to terrorist attacks . SRI during the 2000s . On 28 February 2008 , the Romanian counter - intelligence officers arrested a Bulgarian military attache , Petar Marinov Zikolov , and a Romanian NCO , Floricel Achim . They have been prosecuted with charges of espionage . It is believed that the leaked information might have been sent to Russia or Ukraine . The Bulgarians have denied any connection with Zikolov . This has been one of the few espionage cases that have received media attention . National Alert System . The National Alert System ( Sistemul Național de Alertă Teroristă in Romanian ) is the Romanian terrorist barometer . SNA is a system that , based on existing intelligence from SRI , SIE and possibly other agencies , ranks the risk of a terrorist attack on Romanian territory . The system is color based ( green - low to red - imminent ) . The color can be changed ( and therefore security measures increased ) with the prior approval of the executive of SRI . Currently , SNA is colored blue - cautious ; this means that the intelligence on hand suggests there is a relatively low risk of a terrorist attack . The color has only been changed once ( to red - high ) at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit . Resources . Personnel . The number of employees is officially secret , however newspaper " Adevărul " was able to find in 2006 an estimate of 12 , 000 agents , a figure confirmed by former SIE director Cătălin Harnagea . According to former DIE general Ion Mihai Pacepa , this figure is double the number of agents of the similar service of France ( which has a larger population than Romania ) and larger than Germany ' s secret services , Pacepa noting the unusual size of Romania ' s secret services , leading to claims that Ceaușescu ' s police state has been incompletely dismantled and that the number of officers has actually increased since 1989 .