Enlarge image
PiS boss Jarosław Kaczyński: "Much Ado About Nothing"
Photo: Czarek Sokolowski / AP
Poland's Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński has admitted the purchase of Israeli espionage software of the Pegasus type.
Polish services should have this type of device, Kaczyński told the weekly Sieci in an interview that was published in excerpts on Friday.
The Pegasus software developed by the Israeli company NSO is able to read all data from cell phones that have been attacked with it.
In addition, Pegasus can switch on the device's camera and microphone unnoticed.
When asked whether the government in Warsaw had used Pegasus to eavesdrop on opposition politicians, Kaczyński replied that the software was being used to “fight crime and corruption in many countries”.
This is under the control of courts and prosecutors.
In Poland, "the surveillance system for such activities is one of the strictest in Europe."
He described the opposition's allegations in this context as "much ado about nothing".
According to reports from Polish media, however, the software is said to have been used in at least three cases to monitor people who are inconvenient for Poland's national-conservative PiS government.
The reports are based on findings from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which investigates the misuse of the controversial espionage software around the world.
The prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek, who criticized the judicial reforms, the prominent oppositional lawyer Roman Giertych and Senator Krzysztof Brejza were affected.
In 2019 he led the election campaign of the opposition alliance Citizens' Coalition, which emerged from the liberal-conservative Civic Platform party.
Brejza's mobile phone was reportedly hacked several dozen times during the election campaign leading up to the parliamentary elections in October 2019.
Journalists, human rights organizations and data forensics experts first reported on Pegasus last July.
Across the world, authoritarian governments in particular had used the surveillance software on a large scale against critics, oppositionists and journalists.
"That is the deepest and most serious crisis in democracy since 1989," said the head of the Civic Platform and former EU Council President Donald Tusk.
Brejza and other representatives of the party expressed suspicion that the general election might have turned out differently without the Pegasus attack.
PiS boss Kaczyński contradicted this.
"They lost because they lost," he said, looking at the opposition.
sol / dpa / AFP
