Democracy is frequently envisioned as collapsing through military coups or dramatic, overt interventions. However, academic literature on autocratization reveals a far more silent and gradual reality: democracy undergoes erosion from within when legitimately elected chief executives “exalt” power, weaken accountability, and subvert the boundaries of institutional control. Behind the veil of national defense and security secrecy, state intelligence apparatuses and legal institutions are frequently dragged away from their primary functions to be utilized as instruments for regimes to maintain continuous power.
The crisis of intelligence oversight is not a theoretical fabrication in a number of countries. The phenomenon of mass wiretapping and covert collusion between politicians and intelligence agents demonstrates that dark corners within state bureaucracies are highly vulnerable to being hijacked for the political survival of specific groups. When state institutions holding the authority to wiretap and the media are manipulated to serve political patronage, public oversight becomes the final bulwark separating democratic governance from the clutches of authoritarianism.
From State Protector to Elite Control Instrument
In the normative design of liberal democracies, the intelligence functions of state institutions granted the right to wiretap are established to gather confidential information, anticipate external threats, and maintain public accountability. In practice, however, the relationship between policymakers and intelligence agents is frequently tainted by political pathology. Studies in intelligence observation literature and comparative politics demonstrate how authoritarian regimes or incumbents undergoing autocratization shift their surveillance targets from genuine state enemies toward domestic opposition, critical journalists, and civil society.
A tangible case of this dynamic is clearly recorded in the Target-Fortress mass wiretapping scandal in North Macedonia. Between 2008 and 2015, the country’s security and counter-intelligence agency (UBK) illegally intercepted the communications of more than 20,000 individuals without valid court warrants. The recordings disclosed by opposition leader Zoran Zaev in 2015 contained conversations involving the prime minister, ministers, parliamentarians, judges, state prosecutors, media owners, and journalists, as reported by European Commission experts. In 2021, a court of first instance found eleven defendants guilty, including former UBK head Sasho Mijalkov, who was sentenced to 12 years in imprisonment. Surveillance operations that should have served as instruments of national security instead mutated into instruments of preventive repression to preserve the hegemony of power.
A similar dynamic occurred in Greece following the military junta (1967–1974). Based on political and institutional historical analyses (1974–2008), the National Intelligence Service of Greece (EYP) became trapped in persistent politicization. Political parties taking turns holding power frequently employed a “fight fire with fire” approach—attempting to purge the remnants of the junta’s legacy while simultaneously maintaining tight control over the intelligence service and aligning it with the partisan interests of the ruling party. Consequently, intelligence became trapped in a vortex of political patronage rather than acting as an objective security advisory body.
The Dilemma of Secrecy and Ethical Vulnerability
The subsequent question is why intelligence agency malpractice is so difficult to curb. The answer lies in the intrinsic nature of espionage itself, which relies on secrecy. Intelligence activities operate in a gray zone where public transparency is considered capable of compromising operational security.
However, this veil of secrecy is frequently misused to cover up procedural and legal violations. A case study of the scandal in Slovakia (2011) revealed ethical collusion involving a prominent politician (Robert Kalinak, then a member of parliament from the opposition camp) and a journalist from the Pravda daily (Vanda Vavrova), in which the politician attempted to dictate news reporting to discredit political rivals.
Interestingly, when the transcript document of the conversation leaked to the public, the issue of journalistic ethical collusion was sidelined and submerged beneath polemics surrounding wiretapping operations by the military intelligence service, the validity of which was contested. Prosecution in this journalist wiretapping case was subsequently dismissed by prosecutors in 2015. This event illustrates how intelligence scandals can distract public attention from the underlying political collusion and ethical breaches.
From Rhetoric to Coercive Control
Attacks on state institutions that safeguard public accountability do not occur randomly; rather, they follow a sequential pattern that can be empirically tracked. In studies of autocratization regarding incumbent repression patterns in Hungary and North Macedonia (Ordanoski and Angiolillo, 2026), incumbents shifting toward anti-democracy can be understood through three structured stages: first, legitimization rhetoric. Rulers utilize institutional channels to frame crisis narratives, divide society through “us versus them” polarization, and label watchdog actors or the opposition as national threats.
Second, legal engineering. The executive leverages its political majority in parliament to alter the legal framework, weaken the jurisdiction of the constitutional court, and recruit loyalists into independent supervisory bodies. Third, coercive control. Once the legal environment is successfully modified, the regime launches overt coercive actions, such as raiding NGO offices, electoral intimidation, the imprisonment of critical figures, and mass wiretapping using digital espionage tools (spyware).
This pattern manifested clearly during the administration of Viktor Orbán in Hungary (study period 2010–2023) and Nikola Gruevski in North Macedonia (2006–2017). In both countries, legal engineering targeted horizontal accountability (parliament/judiciary), vertical accountability (elections), and diagonal accountability (media/civil society) before coercive control was systematically executed to paralyze political resistance. Both regimes ultimately came to an end: Gruevski’s administration collapsed, and Orbán was ousted by voters in April 2026.
The Dark Rooms of Power
The erosion of modern democracy is no longer brought down by lines of tanks on highways, but rather through bureaucratic manipulation and the interception of communication signals within the dark rooms of power. Legitimate secrecy within institutions of power possessing intelligence authority is frequently abused by political elites as a shield of impunity to hide moral decay and power collusion from public scrutiny.
If intelligence functions within law enforcement instruments continue to be allowed to operate without independent fire-alarm oversight mechanisms (McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984), democratic transition processes in various countries will be increasingly vulnerable to slipping back toward stable autocracy.
Active mass media investigative involvement and transnational pressure (such as recommendations from European Union institutions or human rights courts) can serve as crucial factors in breaking down the walls of politicized intelligence impunity.
Democratic Restoration
Learning from the cases of the countries mentioned above, preventing intelligence functions from becoming parasites to the constitutional order makes structural intelligence reform a necessity.
First, strengthening legislative and judicial oversight. Every act of communication intervention or citizen wiretapping must be subject to strict authorization based on judicial warrants from courts, rather than unilateral executive orders. The establishment of special supervisory committees in parliament, as well as independent communication privacy review authorities such as Greece’s ADAE (whose members are elected via the Conference of Parliament Presidents and whose decisions can be reviewed in administrative courts), must be granted adequate access to inspect the operational legality of intelligence institutions or intelligence agents existing within state legal bodies.
First [sic], depoliticization of recruitment. The practice of placing intelligence personnel and leadership based on political patronage ties must be ended and returned to professional meritocratic standards. Greece’s experience demonstrates that personnel policies aimed at distancing the intelligence service from the junta’s legacy are an essential step, yet without consistent oversight, politicization persists.
Third, safeguarding press freedom and civic space. Investigative journalism and whistleblowers from within the bureaucracy are frequently the only beacon capable of penetrating the impenetrable walls of state secrecy during abuses of authority. Without external control from civil society, the misuse of state espionage instruments will continually repeat.
Democracy is not an institution that can maintain itself without strict safeguarding. When intelligence instruments lose their accountability boundaries, the state gradually transforms from a protector of national security into the most effective threat to its own citizens’ freedom—even for heads of state and political elites themselves.