Spyware Targets Prosecutor Investigating Trump Belgrade Tower

A Submission to the Belgrade Investment Climate Council, Concerning the Wasteful Duplication of Surveillance in Matters Touching Foreign Towers

The Council has rightly observed that capital, especially capital bearing a famous American surname, is a nervous animal. It will not settle where it may be startled. A tower with the Trump name on it in the centre of Belgrade is a statement of confidence, and confidence, as every minister knows, cannot coexist with a prosecutor who asks whether the paperwork beneath the foundations was lawfully poured.

It is therefore with some embarrassment that I note the present arrangement is grossly inefficient. Prosecutor Rade Bajić, having investigated an allegedly illegal scheme connected to the project, was found to have advanced spyware lodged in his telephone. I make no inquiry into who placed it there. I object only to the expense. Such tools are costly, they must be acquired abroad through intermediaries, and the whole enterprise is liable to be discovered by foreign laboratories with nothing better to do, producing headlines that frighten precisely the investors the operation was meant to reassure.

I propose instead that every prosecutor assigned to a case touching the powerful be issued, on the first morning, a state telephone with the monitoring already installed, together with a signed acknowledgement that he understands it. Consider the advantages. The secret becomes a procedure, and a procedure cannot be exposed, only audited. The prosecutor is spared the fatigue of suspicion, since suspicion is replaced by certainty. And the investor is spared the uncertainty of not knowing what the investigation contains, because he may simply be copied in.

The objection will be raised that a country which watches its own prosecutors cannot expect anyone to trust its courts, and that foreign developers, above all, require courts they can trust. This is the strongest argument against me, and I answer it gladly. The developer does not require courts that are trustworthy. He requires courts that are predictable. An honest prosecutor is the least predictable creature in the Balkans; a fully observed one is as dependable as the tide tables. My proposal does not weaken the rule of law. It merely clarifies whom the law is ruling.

The savings would be considerable, though I decline to invent a figure. Note that the present system spends public money to frustrate a public servant who is himself paid with public money to protect the public. Mine collapses three expenses into one.

I would add a single courtesy. Each issued telephone should carry, on its home screen, a small rendering of the finished tower, so that the prosecutor, laying it face-down on his kitchen table at night as he has lately learned to do, may at least know what is listening.