GEOPOLITICS AND PRESS FREEDOM

Where is press freedom going in the democracies of the West, Is there democracy in the West?

 

By Sir Charlattam

Journalism has long been surreptitiously spied on in the EU and it seems that, given the impossibility of continuing to hide it, governments will try to make it legal. In short, (and even if they don't say so) there is a great interest in establishing police control and repression of thought.

It seems that freedom of the press is a thing of the past in the West. Democracy in these parts is not as democratic as it seems and if not, let's look at the Julian Assange case or the more than 120 journalists killed in the Gaza Strip by Israel in the last six months. What were the motives behind their cases? To inform.

But in reality this is nothing new. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the information censorship of the George W. Bush administration to the physical suppression of many Iraqi journalists, electronic intelligence tools were secretly implemented by the NSA and the CIA to intercept internet nodes and sites that disseminated information on the situation on the ground.

Despite those efforts, leaks remained a problem for Washington and its partners and the internet became a nightmare.

Here in the islands, too, the British government has been a habitual intruder into the communications of others through the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and if not remember the scandal over the interception of mobile phones of some of those attending the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland in 2013, which was contemporaneous with the NSA scandal over the leaks of former agent Edward Snowden.

The advance in communications and the benefits it has brought to public information has at the same time brought with it its dark side, namely technological advances in the ways in which private communications can be intercepted and viewed covertly by methods as sophisticated as the media used to disseminate news.  In this way, from simple phone calls, posts on social networks such as Facebook, X, TikTok, even WhatsUp messages are now easily intercepted and worst of all, access and theft of information from personal mobiles.

One of the leading specialists in this field is Israel. The development in the field of AI and spy software has reached evil levels. It is no coincidence that one of the main suppliers of these intrusive systems to Western governments is the Israeli company “NSO Group” which among other applications is the supplier of the Trojan “Pegasus” and “Predator” which today are a serious problem in Europe.

European citizens began to realise that they were being stealthily watched and soon started to look into it to find out who their stalkers were.

For a while, governments kept silent about these stealth activities, even calling them ridiculous and trying to make people believe that this was impossible. Coupled with this discourse, it was pointed out that this is only done in "undemocratic regimes". But only a few years ago, the scandal of US phone and email tapping of European leaders (Operation Dunhammer) put the issue on the table. What's more, by September 2019, while Trump was in the White House, the secret service detected an eavesdropping network in key government buildings that had been set up by the Mossad. If an American president can have his privacy violated, what can be the difficulty with ordinary citizens?

Today, with the public airing of all this, many are asking what is the extent of these intrusive activities in the West?

The European Union in its subordinate role to Washington -especially Germany and France- over what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza is going too far against the rights and guarantees to inform and access information freely as we saw with the blocking of the “Telegram” network in Spain.

After becoming public knowledge about these technological resources, governments changed their strategy looking for arguments to sustain these policies. For several months now, European governments have been trying to legalise the spying on journalists' chats and sources of information under the well-known argument of “national security”, a very ambiguous and elastic concept, inserted from Washington, which is used to violate the constitutional guarantees of citizens.

But these intrusions into the communications of dissident journalists, citizens, activists and even government officials have mostly been motivated by special interests, linked to corruption and criminal activity within some EU governments. Greece, Hungary and Poland, all of which are known to be NATO members, have been the main targets of such use of resources against their citizens, but they are not the only ones.

Since the beginning of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Atlanticist governments have been increasing their interference in information traffic, especially in situations that leave them in a very bad light.

These concerns have already been raised in the European Parliament, especially by MEPs such as Sophie In't Veld, who said that spyware undermines European values and is probably well aware that she herself may be a victim of these operations without realising it.

The debate is already underway and beyond the fact of malicious intrusion into private communications by many European governments, the theft of information from infected mobile phones and the anxiety this creates about the purpose of this, it becomes inescapable to investigate the role of Israeli industry in the development and provision of this malware, its extensions into the mobile manufacturing industry and the intentions of Israeli intelligence services in all of this.