Widespread mutual espionage, anti-eavesdropping protocols on both sides of the Pacific and the Atlantic, spyware sold to 26 countries: the era of naivety is over, except in the French Parliament.
The world press was moved this week by a revelation which was not a revelation. Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, Larry Fink and the fourteen other captains of industry accompanying Donald Trump to Beijing left their personal phones in the United States, traveled with blank devices and communicated by paper documents in shielded and secure rooms.
However, this protocol has been applied by high-level American delegations for more than a decade. Theresa Payton, former White House chief information officer, summed it up in several media outlets: “We always tell people to assume that everything they say and do is potentially being monitored.”
Moreover, this advice also applies to European leaders since in 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA had been listening to Angela Merkel’s phone for ten years, as part of a program targeting at least thirty-four heads of government. “Spying among friends is not done,” Merkel protested weakly. The NSA has not stopped, however. Operation Dunhammer then documented the complicity of the Danish services with the American agency to monitor their own European neighbors.
That being said, the protocol put in place in China is obviously more drastic than that put in place in Europe, whose countries are allies of the United States. He testifies to two fractures.
The first fracture is technical. The professionalism of the Chinese in terms of cyber espionage and control of their infrastructures no longer needs to be proven. For example, the Chinese group Salt Typhoon compromised the FBI’s legal eavesdropping systems and infiltrated the largest American telecommunications companies in 2024. So much so that the government admitted not knowing how they did it and advised its officials to use Signal encrypted messaging.
The second divide is of course geopolitical, except that paranoia is present on both sides since in July 2025, the Chinese internet regulator summoned Nvidia to demand accountability for the H20 chip, suspected of containing backdoors. American parliamentarians had in fact fueled Chinese suspicions by tabling a text, the US Chips Security Act, planning to impose tracking technologies in chips dedicated to AI exported by American companies.
In summary, everyone spies on everyone but China is an adversary to be taken very seriously. Especially since we must remember that there is a thriving market for commercial spyware. Pegasus, from the Israeli NSO Group, has been sold to twenty-six countries. In July 2021, we learned that Emmanuel Macron’s number would have been targeted by the Moroccan services. As for the Predator spyware, developed by Cytrox within the Intellexa alliance, which includes the French company Nexa, it targeted journalists and MEPs in more than a dozen countries. The context of cyber espionage is therefore global but revealing.
Because, the latest symptom of the deterioration of transatlantic relations, in April 2025, the Financial Times revealed that the European Commission was now providing disposable telephones to its officials traveling in the United States.
The era of naivety is therefore in principle over. However, this global context does not prevent our deputies from continuing to communicate on WhatsApp despite the numerous risks of interception that messaging entails.
