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The great intelligence game – the Republic

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On 30 May 2021 Denmark Radio (DR), the Danish public broadcaster, released the results of a journalistic investigation conducted together with their Swedish, Norwegian and German counterparts and the newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde according to which, between 2012 and 2014, Finnish military intelligence reportedly collaborated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) allowing it to “attach” to Danish submarine cables on which data and conversations pass to spy person of interest European. New details are therefore added to what emerged in 2013, when i leak by Edward Snowden hinted at what was happening.

Despite the understandable protests aroused by the discovery of these new details, there is little to be surprised about. The history of intelligence is characterized by the most unscrupulous initiatives towards anyone. Even with some distinctions, they remember the “free for all” of the matches of American Wrestling where everyone is for himself and God thinks of the rest.

To give some examples, few, outside the circle of insiders, will remember Crypto AG, the Swiss company whose occult owners were the German and American secret services, which produced ciphers sold to international diplomacy and top-level companies. There joint-venture started in 1970 and continued until 1993, when the Federal Intelligence Service withdrew to leave control to the CIA, which continued its management until 2018. Yesterday cryptotelephones, today “crocodiles” on the cables, as in the heroic times of phone phreaking. Not many know that in 2008 the NSA would have spied on an ally of Israel’s caliber, documenting Tel Aviv’s involvement in the assassination of Syrian general Suleiman. Or that in 2009 the UK was caught red-handed reading emails from foreign diplomats attending the G20.

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Faced, therefore, with a pragmatically common behavior, it would be easy to invoke a Mozartian So do all of them or, with respect to the protests of Germany, a more Italic Today to me, tomorrow to you. It would be convenient to dismiss the story as one of the many scandals that periodically emerge on the way in which the intelligence agency world powers protect the interests of their countries.

Instead, it would be worth asking a few questions: in a sector like that of national security, dominated by power politics, it is understandable that each country does everything in its power to acquire a strategic advantage over anyone else, including “friends”, with the only (flexible) limit of political opportunity. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that the choice of intercepting communications from partners and allies is not taken with a light heart. One wonders, then, how is it possible that despite rigorous procedures for the approval of intelligence projects, despite the supervision of independent bodies such as ad hoc courts and the establishment of parliamentary oversight committees, sometimes roses emerge that they have a different scent than the name suggests.

Apart from the Shakespearean metaphor, one possible answer lies in the concept of plausible deniability, the bureaucratic technique that allows, as one descends from the top towards the operational base of an administration, to do in practice what in theory – and according to the law – could not be done.

The most recent public example concerns the United Kingdom, sentenced on 25 October 2021 by the European Court of Human Rights for the shortcomings of the authorization procedures to carry out mass wiretapping. One of the reasons that led the Strasbourg judges to pronounce the verdict was the lack of the categories of keywords (i selector) to select the relevant communications in the form that the intelligence structures must fill in to request authorization to proceed from the Secretary of State. In other words, the Executive authorizes a mass interception without going too much into the merits, the intelligence structures intercept with a wide operational latitude without the government knowing exactly what happens. Also in this case we are dealing with a consolidated technique which, however, when applied to information technology and the network, proves to be less efficient.

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The creation and management of a technological surveillance system requires the involvement of a significant number of people, institutional components belonging to other countries and the inevitable interaction with private subjects (not only Big Tech, but also telecommunications operators and internet providers ). All this leaves many more traces that can be found more easily by those who know how to interpret them. If the journalistic investigations of Hager and Campbell that revealed Echelon’s existence in 1996 were extremely complex and difficult, the Snowden, Manning and Assange cases show how (relatively) easy it has become for a whistleblower reveal secrets that in other times would have been impossible to break. To this must be added the increasingly important (but still hindered) role of the right of access, thanks to which citizens can collaborate in the “bottom-up” control over the work of the institutions, crossing information that in other times they would not have had available or that it would have been extremely difficult to correlate.

The veil of secrecy that envelops intelligence activities is still thick but certainly – thanks to the spread of information technologies – thinner than in the past. It is reasonable to think that States will not stop using all the tools they have at their disposal – none excluded – to protect their national interests. It is also reasonable to assume that they will evolve their strategies to counter the increased capacity of the information sector and civil society to shed light on these activities. It is unlikely that, in a democratic country, there will be a definitive victory on one side or the other which, in an endless game, will compete for the ball by scoring their goal in turn. Also for this reason, the world of intelligence is called the Great Game, the “Great Game”.

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