Poland admits use of Israeli spyware, denies its use on opposition leaders

Poland’s most
powerful politician has acknowledged that the country bought advanced spyware, Pegasus, from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group, but denied that it was
being used to target his political opponents.

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Jaroslaw
Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Law and Justice,
said in an interview that the software, Pegasus, is now being used by secret
services in many countries to combat crime and corruption. He noted that Pegasus
represents a technological advancement over earlier monitoring systems, which
did not allow the services to monitor encrypted messages.

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“It would be bad
if the Polish services did not have this type of tool,” Kaczynski said in an
interview to be published in the Monday edition of the weekly “Sieci,”
excerpts of which were published Friday by the wPolityce.pl news portal.

The interview
follows exclusive reports by The Associated Press that Citizen Lab, a cyber
watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that three Polish government
critics were hacked with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

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Citizen Lab’s verification causes controversy

On Thursday,
Amnesty International independently verified the finding by Citizen Lab that
Sen. Krzysztof Brejza had been hacked multiple times in 2019 when he was running
the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign. Text messages stolen from
Brejza’s phone were doctored and aired by state-controlled TV as part of a
smear campaign in the heat of the race, which the populist ruling party went on
to narrowly win.

Brejza now
maintains that the election was not fair since the ruling party would have had
access to his campaign’s tactical thinking and plans.

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The revelations
have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970s Watergate scandal in the
United States and eliciting calls for an investigative commission in
parliament.

Kaczynski said he
sees no reason to set up such a commission, and he denied that the surveillance
played any role in the outcome of the 2019 elections.

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“There is nothing
here, no fact, except the hysteria of the opposition. There is no Pegasus case,
no surveillance,” Kaczynski said. “No Pegasus, no services, no secretly
obtained information played any role in the 2019 election campaign. They lost
because they lost. They shouldn’t look for such excuses today.”

The other two
Polish targets confirmed by Citizen Lab were Roman Giertych, a lawyer who
represents opposition politicians in a number of politically sensitive cases,
and Ewa Wrzosek, an independent-minded prosecutor.

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Kaczynski’s
allies had previously denied that Poland purchased and used Pegasus.

Polish Prime
Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Citizen Lab-AP findings “fake news” and
suggested a foreign intelligence service could have done the spying — an idea
dismissed by critics who said no other government would have any interest in
the three Polish targets.

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Deputy Defense
Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz in late December said “the Pegasus system is not
in the possession of the Polish services. It is not used to track or surveil
anyone in our country.”

Media reports say
Poland purchased Pegasus in 2017, using money from the so-called Justice Fund,
which is meant to help the victims of crimes and rehabilitate criminals.
According to investigations by the TVN broadcaster and Gazeta Wyborcza daily,
it is used by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, a special service created to
combat corruption in public life that is under the political control of the
ruling party.

“The public money
was spent on an important public purpose, related to the fight against crime
and the protection of citizens,” Kaczynski said.

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Dozens of
high-profile cases of Pegasus abuse have been uncovered since 2015, many by a
global media consortium last year, with the NSO Group malware employed to
eavesdrop on journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights
activists from the Middle East to Mexico.

The Polish hacks
are considered particularly egregious because they occurred not in a repressive
autocracy but in a European Union member state.