Could it be, and I just thinking out loud and speculating here, that the Belgium government or secret service knew about this and that the UK was simply using Belgacom as "target practise"?
I mean, I would assume that GCHQ would would want to test the effectiveness of their systems that using an EU member state and partner would make sense but you obviously don't want them to generally know about it because it wouldn't make the target practise legit.
The Belgian government has a lot to lose in all this. They host the EU parliament which was a top target for this exercise. If the Belgian government would be found to be complicit in this then the fall-out might include such things as a relocation of the EU parliament to a country that would not readily bend over to aid another country in spying on the EU parliament members.
That alone I think is sufficient to highly doubt Belgian government involvement in this.
The Belgian government is highly incompetent in all matters related to cyber security (amongst many other things).
There was a case a few years back, where apparently some of their more important systems were infected by an unknown trojan or a piece of spyware - can't exactly remember what it was.
I believe, at the time, they assumed that it came from the NSA. Guess who they called to fix it? The NSA.
Personally, I believe they should've been able to fix it themselves. Then again, I'm also the kind of person who believes that you don't spy on your friends.
> Personally, I believe they should've been able to fix it themselves.
Difficult to fix stuff when you don't have both access to the source code AND verifiable builds. And we know that no one can trust Cisco in any case - if Cisco themselves do not cooperate, NSA will intercept the parcel en route anyway.
I mean, I would assume that GCHQ would would want to test the effectiveness of their systems that using an EU member state and partner would make sense but you obviously don't want them to generally know about it because it wouldn't make the target practise legit.
Again, just speculating..