Spyware Targets Prosecutor Investigating Trump Belgrade Tower

Here is what happened. A prosecutor in Belgrade, Rade Bajić, looked into an allegedly illegal scheme connected to a Trump tower project in the city. Then someone put advanced spyware on the prosecutor’s telephone. That is the event: an official whose job was to read other people’s papers found that their own pocket was being read instead.

Here is how this kind of thing is usually described: “lawful interception,” “security cooperation,” “tools sold only to governments for fighting terrorism and serious crime.” The tower, for its part, is a “strategic investment” and a “landmark development.” The gap between those phrases and the plain fact is the subject of this piece.

Translate “lawful interception” into English and you get this: a machine that turns a person’s telephone into an informer against them. It hands over every message, every contact and every half-formed thought typed at midnight, and it carries no warrant that the target will ever see. “Tools sold only to governments” means the buyer is a state, and the people who decide what counts as serious crime are the people least likely to be investigated for it. When the person being watched is a prosecutor examining a property deal tied to the family of the American president, the phrase “fighting serious crime” has been turned inside out. The criminal investigation is the thing being fought.

The strongest objection is that we do not know who ordered it. That is fair, and it should be said plainly. But consider what the spyware is for. Nobody needs to break into a prosecutor’s phone to learn what the case file says, because the file will come out at trial. The value lies in what is not in the file: the informant’s name, the colleague who wavered, the deputy whose rent is overdue. The point is to learn the case’s weak joints before it can stand up. There is a second purpose as well, and it works whether or not anything useful is found. Every prosecutor in Serbia now knows that this is what happens to the one who opens that particular drawer. The next one will open it more slowly, or not at all. Picture an honest official in some government office setting a phone face-down on the desk before saying a single sentence. That gesture is the real product being sold.

Now the test I try to apply to my own side. People who loathe Trump will find this easy to condemn. But plenty of them were relaxed about surveillance when it was aimed at people they disliked, and some of their governments buy from the same catalogues. If the tower belonged to a progressive billionaire and the prosecutor were a nuisance to a left-wing government, the outrage would have to be exactly as loud. If it would not be, it was never about the spyware.

Belgrade is getting its tower. Whether it gets its trial is less certain, and the main witness against Rade Bajić’s privacy is the telephone Bajić paid for.