Poland’s most powerful politician has admitted that the country bought advanced spyware from Israeli surveillance software maker NSO, but denied that it was being used to target opponents. his politics.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Law and Justice, said in an interview that secret services in many countries are using Pegasus anti-crime and corruption software.
Kaczynski said such uses of spyware have arisen in response to the growing use of encryption to mask data in transit, which has beaten previous surveillance technologies. . By hacking phones, it allows authorities to monitor communications, as well as real-time conversations, that are not encrypted.
“It would be bad if Polish services didn’t have this kind of tool,” Kaczynski said in an interview published in the Monday edition of the weekly magazine Sieci. News portal wPolityce.pl published the excerpts on Friday.
The interview followed exclusive reports by the Associated Press that Citizen Lab, a cyber-monitoring group at the University of Toronto, found that three critics of the Polish government had been hacked. By NSO Pegasus.
On Thursday, Amnesty International independently verified Citizen Lab’s finding that Senator Krzysztof Brejza was attacked multiple times in 2019 while he was running the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign. .
Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone were persuaded by state-controlled television in Poland and broadcast as part of a smear campaign in the heated race, which the ruling party follows populism almost won.
Brejza still maintains that the election is unfair because the ruling party will have access to the tactical thinking and planning of his campaign.
The revelations of the hack rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970 Watergate scandal in the United States and prompting calls for the creation of an investigative committee in parliament.
Kaczynski said he saw no reason to set up such a committee and he denied that surveillance played any role in the outcome of the 2019 election.
“There is nothing here, no reality, except the hysteria of the opposition. No Pegasus cases, no surveillance,” said Kaczynski. “No Pegasus, no service, no secret information obtained played any role in the 2019 election campaign. They lost because they lost. They shouldn’t make excuses like that today.”
Two other Polish goals confirmed by Citizen Lab are Roman Giertych, a lawyer who represents opposition politicians in a number of politically sensitive cases, and Ewa Wrzosek, an independent-minded prosecutor.
When asked by the AP in December if Poland had bought Pegasus, state security spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn neither confirmed nor denied. However, many of Kaczynski’s allies are openly skeptical of the government’s proposals to use Pegasus.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Citizen Lab-AP findings “fake news” and suggested that a foreign intelligence agency may have carried out the espionage – an idea dismissed by critics. who argue that no other government is interested in Poland’s three goals.
Deputy Defense Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz said at the end of December that “the Pegasus system is not owned by Polish services. It is not used to track or survey anyone in our country. “
Polish media reports say Poland bought Pegasus in 2017, using funds from the so-called Justice Fund, which aims to help victims of crime and rehabilitate criminals.
The software is used by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, a special service created to fight corruption in public life, according to investigations by TVN and the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. political control of the ruling party.
“Public money is spent on an important public purpose, which is related to the fight against crime and the protection of citizens,” says Kaczynski.
Dozens of well-known Pegasus abuse cases have been uncovered since 2015, many by a global media consortium last year, suggesting NSO Group malware was used to listen steal journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights activists from the Middle East to Mexico.
Hacks in Poland are considered particularly serious because they occurred not in a repressive autocracy but in a European Union member state.
Amnesty International Poland’s director, Anna Błaszczak, alleged in a statement Friday that spying on the opposition would be consistent with the Polish government’s conduct under Law and Justice. The EU has increasingly criticized Poland for judicial interference and other actions seen as anti-democratic.
“These findings are shocking but not surprising. “They cause serious concern not only for politicians, but also for the entire Polish civil society in general, especially in light of the government’s record of persistent subversion of human rights and the rule of law,” Blaszczak said.
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