“I feel in a way it’s a kind of duty,” Campo told me. He spent years working for WhatsApp and Telegram in San Francisco, but recently moved home. Campo, a soft-spoken thirty-eight-year-old with tousled dark hair, was born and raised in Catalonia and supports independence. He had been getting suspicious texts and wanted to have the device analyzed. Solé, who is forty-five and wore a loose-fitting suit, handed over his cell phone, a silver iPhone 8 Plus. One afternoon last month, Jordi Solé, a pro-independence member of the European Parliament, met a digital-security researcher, Elies Campo, in one of the Catalan parliament’s ornate chambers. Leaders of the independence movement, some of whom live in exile across Europe, now meet in private and communicate through encrypted messaging platforms. On the day of the referendum, which received the support of ninety per cent of voters despite low turnout, police raids of polling stations injured hundreds of civilians. In 2017, as Catalonia prepared for a referendum on independence, Spanish police arrested at least twelve separatist politicians. Today, a majority of Catalan parliamentarians support independence for the region, which the Spanish government has deemed unconstitutional. The citadel was built with forced labor from hundreds of Catalans, and its remaining structures and gardens are for many a reminder of oppression. The parliament of Catalonia, the autonomous region in Spain, sits on the edge of Barcelona’s Old City, in the remains of a fortified citadel constructed by King Philip V to monitor the restive local population.
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