Various State Security sources agree in qualifying at least “illegal & rdquor; the wiretapping investigation system of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), either with Pegasus or with other telephone assault programs. Y the relevance of this procedure will be one of the keys in the appearance of the director of the espionage service, Peace Stephenbefore the commission of official secrets of the Congress.
The CNI’s method is no different from that of any other secret service, but it is different in Spain from the forms followed by the National Police, the Civil Guard, the Mossos or the Ertzaintza when they do judicial police work and perform listening for the instruction of a summary.
The difference is in the permits: Police and Civil Guard have to process them subject to subject, while the CNI -the sources consulted corroborate- grows and expands your listeners in the form of a tree without too many intermediate formalities.
This procedure could explain the high number of Catalan independentistas supposedly spied on with Pegasus, according to the analysis of the Canadian entity Citizen Lab, without there being official confirmation in Spain that all those on that list were spied on by the CNI. Some of the computer traces may not be from Pegasus and may be from other similar listening systems. Only one who owns Pegasus can detect a hundred percent, with zero margin of error, a Pegasus attack.
without going off the rails
“For any secret service, when you track to acquire intelligence the objective is that: to acquire intelligence. That is: everything matters and not just a part of what is seen or heard from a target & rdquor ;, a former member of the CESID and the CNI explained to this newspaper at the beginning of the current installment of the Pegasus scandal.
That, which among spies is mere logic, is not legal practice among policemen. The security forces that depend on the Ministry of the Interior or the autonomous communities must receive court permission to activate SITELyour wiretapping system.
SITEL supports various call tracking and messaging software and access to mobile phones and fixed telephones, among which the Pegasus program is not – Interior has denied it.
When the Police or the Civil Guard have to listen to a person under investigation, these police forces They make a request to the corresponding judge of the case. The judge issues the authorization in the proceedings… and also a code. With this code, SITEL is activated.
All wiretaps with SITEL, therefore, have the judicial authority that orders them fixed and also the trail of the agents who carry them out. If, during this investigation, the person listened to speaks with another person who turns out to be of interest for the investigation of the case, the police will have to make another request to the judge to extend listening to this new objective. The result of the hearings and their interpretive analysis are sent to the judge, without prejudice to the fact that a complete transcript is available to the judge.
The system is more confusing in the case of the CNI, among other reasons because, according to the law that regulates the center, not only its agents and media, but also its procedures, are secret.
The espionage service requests authorization from the judge who -by innovation of the minister Federico Trillo in 2002 – he is entrusted with five years of control over the CNI. But, once the follow-up or listening, this branches out according to the needs of the mission and up to the limit that those needs advise, forming a tree. One of the State Security sources explains it ironically by turning another figure, Parcheesi: “About twenty and I count one & rdquor ;. The result of these wiretaps is not reported to the CNI judge, but to the political superiors.
difficult control
The uniqueness of Spain as the only country on the planet with a designated judge to authorize actions by the intelligence service did not free this country, already in 2011, from a European rapaquín. When the figure of judicial control had already been in force for nine years, a report from the European Parliament in June of that year harbored a severe criticism of the “failures in the supervision mechanisms & rdquor; of the National Intelligence Center.
Certainly, rather than the action of the judge, the European criticism was directed more at the broad capacity that the law grants the Government to classify secrets and hide data from the deputies.
The Supreme Court judge for the CNI cannot do much, not to say that “something is sold & rdquor ;, as judicial sources say. His mission is to authorize or deny investigations that they must be nominal, limited and motivated. In other words, they must have a specific natural or legal person as their objective, that they must be limited in time and that the request must be accompanied by a written explanation, the breadth and precision of which are left to the judge’s judgment.
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But “the CNI judge authorizes, he does not supervise as an investigating judge does & rdquor ;, summarizes one of the judicial sources consulted. In other words, the CNI informs him of the start of an investigation, but does not notify him of the result of that investigation or, therefore, of the secondary paths followed to achieve that result, which ends up being an intelligence report on the president’s desk. of the Government, that of the Minister of Defense or those of other senior officials authorized by them.
And that is one of the reasons that pays to the secret services listening tree. All in all, it is a general opinion among the executives consulted in State Security that the Pegasus scandal is inflating the value of wiretaps among the public at the expense of less cybernetic and much more usual methods. Among them, the living sources, those that have current participation in the matter under investigation. Why’s that there are ways to mislead who listens to someone else’s phone and not so many in a face-to-face conversation with a confidant. “In reality – sums up an active veteran of the Civil Guard Information Service -, the most valuable thing for an investigation is still a living source, a flesh and blood collaborator & rdquor ;.