The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, hardly provided news, data or indications of what measures will be taken in the face of the successive revelations about the use of the communications espionage system pegasusused by the National Intelligence Center (CNI), is supposed to follow the established channels, but it remains to be seen by whom else, against whom and with what other irregular procedures. The limitations on the dissemination of the content, object and procedures of the CNI’s activities probably left it little room to be more explicit, beyond some statements in the correct sense: defending that interventions have only been carried out with judicial authorization, that all that has not followed this channel is simply criminal and must be immediately brought to justice and show the willingness to clarify what happened, even declassifying secrets if necessary. Robles forwarded part of the pending questions to the director of the CNI, Paz Esteban López, although his appearance this Thursday before the official secrets commission will be limited by no less restrictions. And even more, the diffusion of what is revealed inside. It will be necessary to draw conclusions from the following decisions made by the Government and from the reaction of the different parliamentary groups, although it is to be feared that their agreement or disagreement with the information they receive may depend more on their previous positions than on their satisfaction with the data to be transferred.
While ERC demanded from the beginning the head of Margarita Robles, a condition unaffordable at this time by Pedro Sánchez, the intrusion into the cell phones of the President of the Government and the Minister of Defense, unnoticed for a year, opportunely made available the figure of Paz Esteban López as a fuse of the crisis. Exit that, for the moment, the support of Robles and the tension between Moncloa and Defense on the distribution of responsibilities do not make it easy.
If the spread that six dozen pro-independence politicians potentially spied on by Pegasus were added to the names already known a year ago, it endangered relations between the Government and ERC in generic terms -and the approval of the measures in the face of the warlike emergency in others much more specific–, the response of the Government once again cracked the joints of the coalition with Podemos and now the search for those responsible for the espionage of the cell phones of Pedro Sánchez and Margarita Robles opens a new fissure between Moncloa and the Ministry of Defense ( and with it, the CNI). The assumption of responsibilities for the serious security error, by the person concerned, but also the reporting and identification of all interventions carried out outside the regulated channels and those responsible, inside or outside the structures of the State and inside or outside the Spanish borders, They are essential. Also the review of a judicial control system which must necessarily be opaque but on which there is ample evidence that it is insufficient, too easily extended to people and times that go beyond what is justified before the competent magistrate, who approves nominal, limited and motivated interventions but then does not have no oversight mechanism to ensure that it proceeds within these limits. The consequences on the stability of the legislature in an economically and diplomatically delicate moment (one more) do not allow anything less than this to happen.