“Everyone was spied on in the Vatican,” Ignazio Ingrao, Panorama magazine’s Vatican expert, declared in a telegraph.co.uk report dated March 1, 2013. He said the efforts “seemed eerily like a Vatican Big Brother,” a reference to the motto “Big Brother is watching you” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Recent testimonies in a Vatican financial crimes investigation and trial indicate the spying is ongoing.