Most of the Pegasus attacks occurred after the sentence of the 'procés'

More than fifty Catalan independence leaders were supposedly spied on with the Israeli program Pegasus, but only one, the former president of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) Jordi Sànchez, was a victim of this system during the

, the secessionist challenge that ended with the unilateral declaration of independence on October 27, 2017. During those months in which the Generalitat showed its pulse to the State by disobeying the Constitutional Court and organizing the illegal independence referendum on 1-O, Pegasus did not attack the motives of the secessionist leaders, despite the fact that in the case of Sànchez it indicates that he had the capacity to do so.

However, Pegasus' interest in the independence leaders was unleashed throughout 2019 and 2020, when the leaders of the

had already been neutralized through the courts and the pro-independence challenge had subsided.

The use of Pegasus to know the intentions and movements of the independence environment could only be legal if it had been authorized by a judge, either within one of the many judicial proceedings that were opened in the peak years of the

, or through the prior permission of the magistrate of the Supreme Court in charge of controlling the National Intelligence Center (CNI).

The Spanish intelligence service has among its functions that of "preventing and avoiding any threat to the territorial integrity of Spain", and the law that regulates its prior judicial control considers that measures that affect the secrecy of communications can be endorsed when "they result necessary for the fulfillment of the functions assigned to the Center.

Under this umbrella, judicial authorization could have been requested to intercept the communications of the pro-independence leaders, as in fact was done through the usual systems of telephone intervention during the judicial investigation of some of the cases opened in the

.

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Spied before being spied on by Pegasus

However, the bulk of the alleged espionage of Pegasus took place when the main legal cases against the independence leaders were already judged or, at least, with the investigation finished.

Of the 59 people spied on, according to the Citizen Lab report, only the attacks on Jordi Sànchez apparently have a clear link to the

: already in 2015, shortly after a big secessionist demonstration in Barcelona, ​​he received the first SMS from Pegasus.

And in 2017, when the association he chaired led the citizen mobilizations in favor of independence, he was attacked at least five times on important dates between April and October, including on the Diada of September 11, when the ANC gathered around a million people in the streets of Barcelona;

and on October 13 of that year, three days before being arrested and sent to preventive detention accused of sedition.

But, aside from the attacks on Sànchez, no more Pegasus intrusions have been documented during 2017 and only three in 2018, when the Supreme Court was in full investigation of the

.

Thus, the mobile phones of the president of the PDeCAT, David Bonvehí (according to the report, "at some point" between September 30 and January 30, 2019), and Dolors Mas ("at some point" between 27 September 2018 and August 28, 2019), businesswoman and partner of Joan Matamala, a close friend of Carles Puigdemont.

In 2019, however, more than twenty people were spied on, always according to the Citizen Lab report. Between February and June, the Supreme Court hosted the trial against 12 independence leaders, but the activity of Pegasus around those dates is minimal, although existed.

While the hearing was being held, Bonvehí's cell phones were attacked;

the deputy of the Parliament for the CUP Carles Riera;

or Meritxell Bonet, journalist and wife of the then president of Òmnium Cultural, Jordi Cuixart, who was being tried and whom Bonet was visiting in prison.

But the intrusions of the Israeli program increased, especially at the end of that year, after the Supreme Court ruling that on October 14 sentenced 9 secessionist leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison.

The publication of the judicial resolution was followed by days of intense demonstrations that ended with dozens of detainees, but the main activity of Pegasus occurs weeks later, when these episodes have already ceased.

This is the case of the intrusion suffered in November by the Matamala mobile, whose terminal had been attacked for the first time in August;

or by Josep Costa, a lawyer and former vice president of Parliament, allegedly spied on in December and who had also been spied on in July.

The attacks continued to occur in 2020, in full confinement decreed by the Government on March 14 to combat the covid-19 pandemic.

During the months that the state of alarm lasted (until mid-June), a dozen people were allegedly spied on, including the then president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, the lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde (defender, among others, of Oriol Junqueras) or the former Minister of the Interior of the Generalitat and former ERC deputy Xavier Vendrell, in addition to some previously attacked, such as Matamala or Bonvehí.

Pegasus' activity continued during the summer and until the end of that year, when Spain was immersed in the pandemic and the independence challenge had apparently been left behind.

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