Spyware Targets Prosecutor Investigating Trump Belgrade Tower

The policy is debated in terms of structure, funding, and institutional design: who licenses spyware, which vendors sell it, what oversight governs its use. What is not debated, and what will decide whether anything changes, is the character of the people who chose to point it at Rade Bajic’s phone.

Consider what the act confesses. A prosecutor in Belgrade examines an allegedly illegal scheme connected to a Trump tower project, a venture where the interests of a foreign family famous for its name meet the interests of a government that has grown comfortable without scrutiny. Someone then decides that the proper response is not to answer his questions but to read his messages. Advanced spyware is not a cudgel. It is a magnifying glass, held over a man’s private life in search of a flaw. Nobody spends that kind of money surveilling a man they can simply buy. The instrument is an involuntary tribute to the target: it is what the powerful reach for when they suspect integrity and hope to find a lever beneath it.

This is the uncomfortable point for those who cast the matter as a failure of regulation. The strongest version of that argument deserves respect. Tighten export controls, the argument runs, punish the vendors, require judicial warrants, and the tool cannot be abused. I would sign such a petition gladly. But every one of those safeguards is administered by a clerk, a procurement officer, a judge, a technician at a keyboard who receives an instruction and must decide whether to carry it out. An authoritarian regime does not abolish rules. It cultivates functionaries who have learned that the rules describe what one says, not what one does. In such a system the warrant is signed; it is simply signed by a man who knows better and has been formed never to act on it.

What formation produced him? Not wickedness, chiefly, but a long apprenticeship in deference: the habit of treating loyalty upward as the whole of duty, and the quiet prudence of never asking whom a task serves. A country can build that habit across a generation of civil servants as surely as I once taught village children their letters, by daily repetition until it no longer feels like a choice.

So the practical test of any reform is whether it produces people who will refuse. Laws that cannot find a single refuser are ornaments.

Somewhere in Belgrade a prosecutor still goes to work, knowing his phone may be listening to him. That man is the only safeguard in this story that functioned, and nobody legislated him into existence.