2023-10-28 17:25:00
Last Tuesday in the show Il peut que on parole, we made the following observation: nowadays, terrorists who manage to organize themselves “the old-fashioned way” without telephones or computers have every chance of falling under the radar. intelligence service radars. Recent events in Israel, France and Belgium are proof of this. But these events will not be enough to reverse the trend.
The reason is simple: the rapid digitalization that we are experiencing at the moment concerns all professions, including general intelligence which has gradually abandoned the field in favor of everything digital.
Security agents inspecting satellite images or intercepting exchanges on encrypted messaging services have – we are told – gradually replaced field agents crisscrossing the country in search of good leads.
It is normal, however, given the evolution of the threat, that Belgian and foreign intelligence services work mainly online. It is mainly online that we are radicalized today, it is online that terrorists are incited to act and it is very often online that they document their actions once the attacks have been committed. .
However, if State Security concentrates all its forces on cyber, it runs the risk of gradually losing the know-how of field intelligence, which in certain cases proves more effective.
The paradox in Belgium is that Brussels is a nest of foreign spies who willingly practice intelligence in the flesh, on our soil.
Countries like Russia still believe in the benefits of deploying field agents, even though we no longer have many people on the ground to monitor these agents.
Second aberration, perhaps the most serious: we learned this week that the computer program used by Belgian State Security is a convoluted, slow “brol” that makes it difficult to cross lists and files. More and more agents are complaining regarding this absurdity today. If focusing on digital intelligence in Belgium means complicating the lives of agents with poorly designed computer programs, then no, definitely, we are not a country of secret agents.
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