Modern Espionage and Its True Necessity

Serious tension between the United States, China and Russia. Spies that hide in airports. Claims of seizures among “satellite” countries of information about third parties. This is not a description of headlines from 1975. There is no Iron Curtain. It is not the Warsaw Pact against NATO. Although you may not believe it, this actual scene from the Cold War is happening today, in front of your eyes.

Edward Snowden, a former technician of the U.S. secret service, is the latest link in a chain of people who have reported that a country has dedicated itself to spying for its own unspecified purposes. Already famous worldwide is the almost permanent refugee in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, the Australian Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks, who gained great fame thanks to the data supplied in part by U.S. Army information analyst Bradley Manning.

In the last few days, the European and North American media have been taken with this information. Cable channels for Latin America such as NTN24 and CNN in Spanish have largely occupied themselves with these topics.

And we are not just talking about government informers. We see how in many countries they speak about unauthorized tapping by the justice system of phone calls, text messages, emails, recordings of conversations with prominent politicians, etc. With regard to this last aspect, we saw how the Spanish justice system found out that the president of The People’s Party of the Autonomous Community of Catalunya in Spain had managed to make a payment of one million euros ($1,278,694) via private espionage — after it was discovered that he had been recorded illegally while lunching in a restaurant with the ex-girlfriend of a senior leader of an autonomous government party from that region.

Countries like North Korea are constantly accused of using their state information platforms for data theft or cyberspying. Now there is the possibility that powerful search engines like Google have joined in and, through legal obligation, have begun to erase information that — like everything uploaded to the Internet — ends up being public and permanent as much as you might try to hide or stop it. Still, this is only one possibility.

The truth is that espionage is part of human nature. We all want to know what others think of us, so that we can defend ourselves. In this age that we live in, with everything computerized, the truth is that human intervention is imperative in managing what kind of information is useful and what kind is not.

Therefore, only the agencies of developed nations with the greatest experience are capable of using intelligence information for state labor. In our countries, our politicians must understand that there is no use having the best encryption or decryption software in the world. There is no use for the most sensitive antennas, or the fastest or most powerful computers. Political espionage in Latin America is nonsense. We Latin Americans are very inclined to disclose all of our problems to our husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends. It is highly likely that a spy will end up being reported quickly through a leak in the family. And let’s not talk about the analysis of information. Why would I want to know the conversation between two politicians? Usually these chats revolve around nonsense or promises that will not be fulfilled. Amen to those who plan to break the law.

So now, yes — on transgressors of the law. In our modern world, the best way to combat crime is to foresee it. Our countries, where what we lack are resources, must understand that the focus on the topic of intelligence must be exclusively about these issues. Imitating what the military powers do is absurd because most of the time, behind these flamboyant espionage schemes, there is an entire enterprise that is out of our scope as a region.

These small police units that dedicate themselves to pursuing crimes through schemes of technology are not at all useful if they are not connected to other services in as many countries as possible.

In our countries, political intelligence teams at the service of the state are an unnecessary expenditure. The fact that a single analyst could disseminate information on everything it does is the best example that the United States — without the need to defend the integrity of large armies or multimillion-dollar business empires — should only have government intelligence doing the policing.