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.