Spyware Targets MEP Investigating Pegasus Abuses
The crisis room assumes it knows which threats are real and which are imagined. It does not. It assumes it can distinguish the legitimate inquiry of a representative from the malicious act of a foreign power, and in doing so, it assumes it possesses the precise, localized knowledge required to make that distinction without suppressing the very signals that would reveal the truth. Here is what happens when the European parliamentary committee acts as though it can administer justice through surveillance.
We are told that Stelios Kouloglou, a Member of the European Parliament, was subjected to spyware while investigating the very abuses of Pegasus spyware orchestrated by the NSO Group. The irony is not merely cruel; it is epistemological. The committee seeks to uncover a hidden network of manipulation. To do so, it employs the same mechanism of hidden manipulation. The planner’s problem is not that Mr. Kouloglou lacks intelligence or good faith. It is that the information required to secure his investigation - the identity of the attackers, the scope of the compromise, the provenance of the data - cannot be centrally processed because the attackers have already seized the means of information production.
When an institution tries to enforce transparency by using opacity, it does not create order. It creates a spontaneous order of fear. The market for political integrity relies on signals: the price of trust, the cost of verification. When the NSO Group sells its tools, it is selling a commodity that no central authority can replicate or regulate because the knowledge of how to use them is distributed among those who wish to evade the law. By allowing the investigation to be conducted under the shadow of the same spyware, the committee suppresses the price signal. It signals that the cost of truth is infinite, and that the only way to approach it is through the very corruption it seeks to expose.
Consider the gesture of the investigator. He sits before his screen, knowing that the eyes of the state - or those who sell to it - are upon him. He types a question. He pauses. He deletes it. This is not a moment of personal weakness; it is the rational response of an individual actor to a system that demands he possess knowledge he does not have. He does not know who is watching. He does not know what is being recorded. He cannot know. And so, the investigation withers, not because it is illegal, but because it is unadministerable. The spontaneous order that emerges is one of self-censorship, a complex web of silence that no decree can unravel.
The ratchet is inevitable. Once we accept that the state may use the tools of the oppressor to fight the oppressor, we must accept that it must use the tools of any future oppressor to fight them. The NSO Group is not a unique evil; it is a symptom of a world where information is a weapon rather than a medium. If we respond to the weaponization of information with more weaponization, we do not restore the rule of law. We accelerate the slide into serfdom, where every interaction is monitored, every thought is pre-empted, and every inquiry is suspect.
The legitimate concern here is the integrity of the political process. We must protect the ability of representatives to conduct sensitive investigations. But the solution cannot be to become what we oppose. The general-rule alternative is not to ban the tools, for that is the pretence of knowledge - we cannot ban what we do not fully understand. The alternative is to establish a constitutional framework that treats surveillance not as a tool of governance, but as a violation of the procedural rules that make governance possible. We must demand that any investigation into abuse be conducted in a manner that is itself immune to abuse.
This requires a humility that the crisis room lacks. It requires accepting that we cannot know the full extent of the threat. It requires trusting that the spontaneous order of public scrutiny, however messy and inefficient, is superior to the designed order of secret policing. When Mr. Kouloglou types that deleted question, he is not failing his duty. He is revealing the failure of the system. The image of the blinking cursor, waiting for a command that will never come, is the true portrait of this moment. It is not a picture of security. It is a picture of silence, and silence is the enemy of all knowledge.