Sparks: Serbian prosecutor who investigated Belgrade Trump tower project ‘targeted with spyware’

A prosecutor armed with a criminal case and a working memory is a mechanism no regime can leave unsupervised, hence the spyware his office did not authorize and his hardware dutifully confessed.

Spyware is the sincerest form of flattery, being the admission that your thoughts are more dangerous than any argument the state could publish against them.

As the garrison engineers the aqueduct to watch the town and forgets that the town drinks from it, so the surveilling hand forgets that the surveyed hand is the one that supplies the state its legitimacy.

In every land the judge who rules against the prince is watched more closely than the merchant who cheats him, and the instrument of watching grows smaller while the price of the verdict grows larger.

You cannot convict a man of building a tower on stolen ground and then spy on the judge for noticing; the spyware is the confession the prosecution could not enter into evidence.

Resentment lacks the courage to indict openly, so it purchases spyware and calls the result security; every surveillance apparatus is a monument to the weakness of those who cannot face a judge in the light.

Things that are hateful: a phone that wakes in the night and betrays its owner; a prosecutor's notebook read by strangers; a tower rising where a courthouse used to stand.

That an officer sworn to enforce the law should be surveilled by the very authority the law restrains, and that this surveillance should pass unnoticed by every branch designed to prevent it, is not the failure of one man but of the architecture itself.

The room is sealed and the man who opened a window is being watched through the glass; the others continue to eat their supper and remark how quiet the street has become.

The committee charged with protecting the prosecutor from surveillance was briefed on the surveillance, approved the budget for it, and asked the prosecutor to submit a written summary of his concerns to the subcommittee.