Espionage, as one of the world's oldest trades, has once again found itself in the spotlight of the world public: Chinese hackers recently entered the American telecommunications infrastructure without authorization with the intention of gathering information and some trivia about presidential candidates Harris and Trump, and thus possibly influencing the very outcome of the election. . Then it was recently revealed that in Italy, Israel's Mossad collects data on Iran's gas trade under sanctions, while Iranian spies collect data on Israel's critical infrastructure. While influencing the outcome of the presidential elections in America and spying on critical infrastructure, especially the energy sector, seem like typical espionage work, the public is mostly amused by the leaking of information by members of the intelligence community that have led to the threat of protected persons.
Namely, the bodyguards of former and current world leaders, such as Trump, Putin and Macron, shared their own physical activities such as frantic running or competitive pedaling on the popular online platform Strava, so that they easily revealed and accurately mapped their mileage and pace to the general public. location of the leader, which, of course, represents a possible security threat. Thus, in the information age, such as ours, with the constant growth of social networks and the sharing of life and other habits on them, spying will take on different forms with some comic outlines.
Although the James Bond movies did their thing, so that even today we associate espionage activities with fashionable life, beautiful companions, powerful cars and lots of adrenaline, modern espionage activities are more suited to well-organized office work within a private company that deals with collecting, processing information, and then, as befits, by selling them. At one time, immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attack, US Senator Bob Graham advocated for a "symbiosis of the intelligence community and the private sector", which in the years that followed would enable the development of large military industrial companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, for which intelligence activities are one of the most important activities, and the main source of profit is contracting jobs with the best of all employers - the state. It is precisely the symbiosis of state management and unscrupulous business that is the main ethical problem of private intelligence agencies: while modern democracies pride themselves on the declarative protection of human rights and the constitutional order, private agencies prefer other patterns of behavior and often move in numerous gray zones, on the other side of morality, but also of the law.
A recent example in Italy, which, although of a more benign type, still managed to stir up the public, supports the thesis that modern intelligence activities are guided by a basic start-up logic: to start a good private intelligence activity, you need one former intelligence officer, one IT expert, a few hackers and one manager of all activities. In order for the desired business to be successful, it is necessary to register the activity and boldly venture into uncertain entrepreneurial waters and into the exciting sphere of private intelligence agencies. That's how the Equalize agency was born, based in Milan, whose activities were led by a certain Carmine Gallo, known in Italy as a super cop, since he spent almost 40 years investigating the most serious crimes, terrorism, mafia and similar criminogenic phenomena. Before the end of his working career, he decided to focus on the private sector, where he gathered a diverse group of hackers - who gained experience working with the well-known Anonymus group, several private investigators and operations directors, who specifically wanted to monetize the information they obtained through illegal means . The illegality for which they ended up in custody facing serious charges consisted of very simple bureaucratic actions. Namely, by taking advantage of security gaps in state databases (Serpico - tax beneficiaries; SDI - incoming and outgoing invoices; INPS - state institute for social insurance and the central database of registry offices), private intelligence officers accessed sensitive data and based on it created real dossiers , which they later planned to monetize on the market. The preliminary investigation shows that they collected around 800.000 dossiers, among which were information on former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, current President Sergio Mattarella, and the circle of politicians close to current Prime Minister Giorgi Meloni. Data from sensitive databases were supplemented with classic hacker strategies, such as access to e-mail, telephone and other communication channels. They became interesting to the Italian security services only when foreign agencies, such as the Mossad, became interested in the collected data, motivated by geopolitics or pure economic interests.
The Italian case is quite exemplary and shows that the privatization of intelligence activities in our age of information is a very dynamic sector that can be well monetized. We used to associate privatization exclusively with the conversion of assets from state to private ownership, and the collapse of all sectors that were once controlled by the state, such as health, education and critical resources. Today, we are witnessing the trend that the intelligence community, which was once considered one of the basic levers of state power, has moved into the corporate empire, taking over certain state functions, putting its resources and forces at the service of the majority of private capital and individual interests, which have always been a great challenge. for every democracy.
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