Spyware Targets MEP Investigating Pegasus Abuses
The plan requires that the delicate, tacit art of parliamentary immunity and investigative discretion be replaced by the explicit rule of digital surveillance. But the practice of political inquiry encodes a specific knowledge of trust, vulnerability, and the unspoken boundaries of official conduct that no algorithm can capture, and the men who possess it - the spies - were not consulted by the institution they sought to protect.
We are told, with the brisk confidence of the Rationalist, that this was a necessary counter-measure. The European Parliament, in its committee on civil liberties, was investigating the NSO Group, a commercial entity that sells spyware to states. The investigation itself was breached. Pegasus, that surgical instrument of intrusion, was turned against the investigators. The response, naturally, is to demand more regulation, more oversight, more explicit rules to govern the digital sphere. But this is to mistake the symptom for the disease. The problem is not that the rules were insufficient; it is that the participants in this affair had forgotten what they were doing.
Politics, in its proper form, is not the management of a society as if it were a machine to be tuned, but the maintenance of a conversation among men who disagree. It is a civil association, where the only commonality is the acceptance of certain adverbial conditions - how we behave, not what we achieve. When a Member of the European Parliament, such as Stelios Kouloglou, undertakes an investigation, he is not executing a project of the state. He is participating in a tradition of scrutiny. This tradition relies on a practical knowledge that cannot be codified: the knowledge that one must sometimes look where one is not expected to look, and that one’s own safety is not guaranteed by the text of the law, but by the mutual understanding of the participants in the game.
The NSO Group, and the states that employ it, operate on a different principle. They view the political world as an enterprise association, directed toward a specific goal: security, control, the elimination of threat. To them, the investigator is not a fellow participant in a conversation, but an obstacle to be removed. They do not understand the tacit knowledge of the parliamentary tradition because they have no share in it. They possess only technical knowledge - how to exploit a vulnerability, how to bypass a firewall, how to install a piece of software that listens. This is knowledge, but it is not wisdom. It is the knowledge of the lockpick, not the keyholder.
The irony, which would be humorous if it were not so serious, is that the very tool used to silence the investigation - the spyware - reveals the fragility of the institution it seeks to undermine. The Rationalist believes that if we simply write down the rules more clearly, the practice will follow. But the practice is not derived from the rules. The rules are merely the visible tip of an iceberg, most of which is submerged in the practical knowledge of those who live by them. When that knowledge is ignored, the institution becomes hollow. It becomes a shell, easily penetrated by those who understand only the exterior.
What, then, should be done? The temptation is to respond with more rules, more technical fixes, more surveillance of the surveillers. This is to repeat the error. The tradition of civil association suggests a different path. It suggests that we must recover the practical knowledge that has been lost. We must recognize that the integrity of the political process depends not on the perfection of its code, but on the character of those who inhabit it. We must remember that politics is a conversation, and that a conversation requires a certain degree of silence, a certain amount of unrecorded thought, before it can begin.
The breach of Stelios Kouloglou’s privacy is not just a technical failure. It is a moral one. It is a failure of the institutions that should have protected him, and a failure of the men who attacked him to understand what they were destroying. They saw a target. They did not see a conversation. And in doing so, they have made the conversation itself more difficult, perhaps impossible. The lesson is not that we need better software. The lesson is that we have forgotten how to speak to one another.