FEW Argentines doubt that the country’s intelligence services needed a shakeup. But the way it happened satisfied almost nobody. On January 26th the president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wheelchair-bound from an ankle injury, appeared on television to announce that she would propose a law to scrap the main intelligence agency, the Intelligence Secretariat (SI), and replace it with a new body whose directors would be named by her and approved by the Senate.

This happened while the SI is at the centre of a furore set off by the death from a gunshot of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who had accused Ms Fernández and other senior officials of trying to thwart his investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s worst terrorist attack. The president, who denies the allegations, quickly pronounced his death a suicide, then hinted that he was murdered by rogue intelligence agents. She suggested the 300-page document detailing Mr Nisman’s allegations had been the product of false information fed to him by the SI. Hence the need for a reform.

But Argentines, some of whom took to the streets after Mr Nisman’s death, do not see her as a credible reformer. They are as confused as ever about what really happened. Their suspicions that the government was somehow involved have not been allayed. Some Jewish groups boycotted the official commemoration of the Holocaust on January 27th, saying the government was mishandling the investigation of Mr Nisman’s death.

Argentines are as wary as the president of the intelligence services, whose structure has changed little since the end of dictatorship in 1983. They still fear illegal eavesdropping and suspect it is used for political ends. Factions within the services intrigue against each other, which makes Ms Fernández’s theories about rogue spies not entirely implausible.

Her proposals would not improve matters much. Decisions about wiretapping would now fall under the attorney-general’s office, whose current chief is famously deferential to the president. Civil-liberties groups think the Supreme Court should be in charge. The reform does not touch the armed forces’ parallel intelligence service. Senate approval of the new agency’s bosses is a good idea. A better one would have been to consult other parties on how to reshape intelligence.

Ms Fernández coupled her pronouncements on espionage with a rant against Clarín, a media conglomerate with which she has clashed since 2008. The man who lent Mr Nisman the gun that killed him, she claimed, is the brother of an information-technology manager at a law firm with links to the company. Clarín immediately denied any connection. What was missing from her soliloquy was sympathy for those bereaved by Mr Nisman’s death, and any assurance that the justice system would discover what had happened.