The real world of the Matrix
A little less than a month before the NATO summit in Madrid on 29 and 30 June, the government wanted to quickly settle the issue of telephone spying with the dismissal of the director of the National Intelligence Centre (CNI), Paz Esteban, allegedly due to security failures.
However, many loose ends remain untied, and the haste to solve a mess in order to satisfy the ERC's government partners and the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonés, has resulted in what has always happened: the public is left in the dark about the truth of the facts.
The government's modus operandi has been neither exemplary, nor modelic, nor transparent, nor reassuring. Whoever has advised President Pedro Sánchez to resolve this issue as soon as possible has forgotten to remind him that manners are always important because he is not the first president whose telephone terminal has been spied on, nor will he be, that not everyone reacts as he does and that it is essential to respect minimum security standards. But we must also know how to use telephone terminals and be cautious; we journalists are well aware of this when we do 'off the record' interviews, travel to conflict zones or do not want to be geolocated.
For Paz Esteban's dismissal, the argument was based on cybersecurity reports by the National Cryptologic Centre (CCN), which depends on the CNI, revealing the discovery of the Pegasus malware on the terminals attacked, including those of the president of the government, several ministers and leaders in Catalonia.
This is the real world and not the Matrix. The fact that it has come to light now is the important thing; the 'momentum'. The rest was already known. Explanations are superfluous.
It is worth remembering that to play in the first division of international politics and want to be counted on, you have to know how to do it. We are coming out of one and into another. We are not reliable or trustworthy exporters, a bad translation of the English language, and that, in international politics, is very dangerous, not to mention in the economy, despite the potential we have.
The Pegasus malware or other very similar systems have hacked the telephone terminals of Angela Merkel, Emanuel Macron, Hillary Clinton, Boris Johnson, the former Belgian Prime Minister and current President of the European Council, Charles Michel, the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, the former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, the President of Iraq, Barham Salih, or the monarch of Morocco, Mohammed VI, and a long list that we will not reproduce here.
Intelligence services have been doing it for decades. In 2014, Barack Obama went so far as to say that as long as he was president, Merkel's phone would not be spied on again, and this happened after the German Attorney General's Office gathered evidence to open a criminal case to establish responsibility for the spying on the chancellor's mobile phone. In other words, Germany caught the US National Security Agency (NSA) red-handed for the spying revealed by the analyst who worked for the agency and made public by The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Obama did not even apologise, but rather highlighted the work of his country's secret services because they collect data and "by definition, they are tasked with finding out what people are planning, what's going on in their minds, their goals. That supports our diplomatic and political goals". This is how clearly he explained the NSA's work in front of Merkel herself at a press conference in 2014, settling the issue.
In Spain, heads are being called for. This time, Paz Esteban's. Loyal civil servants are falling, but not so much politicians who find it hard to resign despite there being more than enough reasons to do so.