The political struggle between the Government and the opposition in Macedonia had a minor climax yesterday, Saturday 31 of January, when the PM announced that the police and other Government agencies prevented a coup d'etat.
Both the PM Nikola Gruevski and the opposition leader Zoran Zaev claim that at the crux of the allegations are data gathered without warrant by intelligence agencies. The PM claims that these data are provided to Mr. Zaev the by a foreign agency, that they mostly target Government officials, and that some of them are not genuine. The opposition leader claims that the data target thousands of ordinary citizens, and are leaked to Mr. Zaev's party by a whistleblower from within the Macedonian agencies that conducted the surveillance. (Both link are to statements which are in Macedonian.)
As we wait to learn the truth, here is what we know:
1. A government led by VMRO-DPMNE in 2001 was accused of warrantless surveillance in 2001. News articles in Macedonian from that period are available on Time.mk.
2. According to Citizen Lab there is a FinFisher Command & Control server in Macedonia since 2013. There has been no denial of this report by any Government institution so far.
3. According to reports based on Snowden's leaks, Macedonia is an European partner country for the NSA surveillance dragnet. Mr. Gruevski has a statement on record that he does not know anything about the agreement between his administration and the US Government.
4. So far there have not been any reports that there is a third foreign government with the ability or capacity to carry out large scale surveillance in Macedonia.
If the above reports are true, then is possible to imagine that the Macedonian Government used Gamma's and NSA's technology to spy on it's citizens, and that someone from the government agencies thought that they went too far - which would make Mr. Zaev story plausible.
It is also possible and less controversial to imagine that the US Government spied on Macedonian government officials (like they spied German Chancellor Merkel). However, in that case it would be very difficult to imagine what did they hear that they thought it is important to be shared with the opposition party.
In any event the ongoing nondisclosure of said data raises much more questions. We don't know, for example, why the opposition party is holding the data for more than 3 months, or why they didn't opt for a Snowden/Wikileaks solution - sharing the data with a trusted media organization, that needn't be Macedonian, to publish the information for most impact.
