As much as the Spanish right criticizes her, the dismissal of Paz Esteban as director of the CNI had become necessary and inevitable after learning of the massive espionage of the leaders and activists of the Catalan independence movement and also after learning that the telephone numbers of the President of the Government and the Ministers of Defense and Interior had been hacked by the Pegasus program. Both issues put the intelligence service under suspicion and the decision adopted this Tuesday by Sánchez to dismiss his boss it was the minimum movement that could be expected from the president to try to close the spy crisis as soon as possible and try to recover the relationship with ERC, a key partner of the Executive in the legislature. However, from the Generalitat and from Esquerra they considered that dismissal insufficient.
It could be considered that yes, that “it is not enough” with the dismissal of Esteban, but not because now they have to keep rolling heads until the demands of Catalan sovereignty feel satisfied. It is not enough, because what is essential, apart from the assumption of responsibilities, is further investigate what happened and why, to know with certainty if what has happened has been the result of premeditated decisions or mistakes in the execution of the instructions received. It is also necessary that the results of these investigations continue to be reported, taking into account, of course, that the limit when revealing these reports is where the security of the State may be endangered. But that must be the only limitation, the rest of the research obtained must be exposed because it is required by the people affected by espionage but also because Spanish society needs it for a reason. question of democratic health and cleanliness. From what has been known so far, Esteban’s dismissal should be enough, but if other political responsibilities are derived from subsequent investigations, these should also be purged.
There are more urgent tasks now facing the Government and the CNI itself, because the two episodes of the espionage crisis, ‘Catalangate’ and the hacking of Sánchez, Robles and Grande-Marlaska’s devices, have shown the need to review procedures both security of communications of senior officials and those referring to the control of requests for intervention. The reasons for reviewing the former are obvious, no State can afford the fragility shown by ours, which has made it easier for the Pegasus program to infect the phones of the most relevant members of the Government and appropriate information that should be more than protected.
Also in the second of the cases, that of the intervention of communications by the intelligence service with judicial authorization, it is essential and urgent to review and strengthen the control mechanisms, given the possibility, not at all improbable, that the espionage of the pro-independence leaders may have gone beyond what is justifiable in terms of the reasons, the number and the selection of the people spied on and also in the time that the intervention lasted. These doubts could be dispelled if the Government declassify the documents that allowed the judicial authorization of these actions. But in any case, a decision to reexamine the system governing the authorization of such eavesdropping and modify it as necessary to avoid possible overreach would be welcome.