Are Fears Over Brexit Talks Being Bugged Warranted?

Earlier this week a story broke stating that the European Union’s Brexit negotiators feared they were being bugged by the British secret service. These fears were allegedly raised on July 13^th during a meeting in the European Council by a top member of Michel Barnier’s Brexit negotiating team.

Suspicion arose after British negotiators supposedly attained the contents of a politically explosive slide presentation within hours of it being presented to a meeting of EU officials last month. These slides reportedly contained highly negative European Commission economic assessments of British plans to remain in the EU’s single market for goods.

If they occurred, any attempts to suppress the publication of said slides by the UK government would appear to be effective as the slides themselves haven’t been published.

However, if the meeting had been bugged by the British government, or any other government for that matter, it seems highly unlikely that the eavesdropping government which went to these lengths would then let it be known what they had done by letting on to what they had found out.

That said when you think for a moment about who would be interested in listening into these discussions you can very quickly make an almost endless list !

Most countries governments for a start, closely followed by the banking and investment sectors, FTSE and Fortune companies and then all of the millions of small companies around the world who are trying to best position themselves after the event. Now realistically it is not going to be the millions of tiny companies in this case, but along with the press all of the others have a lot to lose or gain so one has to wonder.

Hopefully multiple eavesdroppers wont all converge on the meeting room on the same moonlit night or it could all get a little awkward.

Seriously though, in recent years eavesdropping has become so very easy in most situations that the possibility of the meetings being attacked successfully has to be a real risk and the threat of an attack by some of the above listed entity’s has to be a complete given in this case.

If we are being honest, I think we would all like to know what is really going on behind the scenes wouldn’t we ?