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Poland’s most powerful politician has admitted that the country has bought the advanced program of the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, but denied that it was being used against political opponents.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the ruling conservative Law and Justice party, said in an interview that secret services in many countries are using the Pegasus program to fight crime and corruption.
Mr Kaczynski said the need for such a program arose from the growing use of communications encryption, which was stronger than existing monitoring technologies. By interfering directly with telephones, the program enables authorities to monitor communications and conversations in real time and in unencrypted form.
“It would be a bad thing if the Polish services did not have this tool,” Mr Kaczynski said in an interview published in the weekly magazine Sieci.
The interview followed exclusive articles by the Associated Press news agency that the Citizen Lab group, which monitors the internet at the University of Toronto, had discovered that three critics of the Polish government had been attacked by hackers using NSO’s Pegasus program.
On Thursday, Amnesty International independently verified the findings of the Citizen Lab group, that Senator Krzysztof Brejza had been attacked several times by hackers in 2019 when he was leading the opposition election campaign.
The messages stolen from Mr Brejza’s phone were processed and broadcast on state television in Poland as part of a smear campaign at the height of the election race, which was won by the populist party by a narrow margin.
Mr. Brejza already considers the elections unfair, as the ruling party has had access to his tactical thinking and campaign plans.
The revelation of these attacks has shocked Poland, prompting comparisons to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s in the United States, and calls are being made for a parliamentary inquiry commission.
Mr Kaczynski said he saw no reason to set up such a commission, and denied that surveillance played a role in the 2019 elections.
“There is nothing here in fact, except the hysteria of the opposition. “There is no Pegasus case, no surveillance,” said Mr Kaczynski. “Neither Pegasus, nor the services, nor the information obtained through secret channels played any role in the 2019 election campaign. They lost because they lost. “They should not be looking for such excuses today.”
The Citizen Lab confirmed that the other two people who were attacked were Roman Giertych, a lawyer representing opposition politicians in a number of politically sensitive cases, and Ewa Wrzosek, an independent prosecutor.
Mr Kaczynski’s allies had previously denied that Poland had bought and used the Pegasus program.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the findings of the Citizen Lab and the Associated Press “fake news” and suggested that the surveillance was carried out by another country’s intelligence agency, an idea rejected by critics who say no other government would have no interest in attacking the three Polish persons who became the target.
Deputy Defense Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz said in late December that “the Pegasus system is not available from Polish services. It is not used to track or monitor any person in our country.
Polish media report that Poland bought the Pegasus program in 2017, using money from the so-called Justice Fund, which aims to help victims of crime and rehabilitate convicts. According to an investigation by the TVN channel and the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, the program is used by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, a special service set up to fight corruption in public life and under the political control of the ruling party.
“Public funds were spent for an important public purpose, related to the fight against crime and the protection of citizens,” said Mr Kaczynski.
Dozens of significant cases of Pegasus program abuse have been uncovered since 2015, many of them by a media consortium last year that found that the NSO Group’s malicious program had been used to eavesdrop on journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights activists, from the Middle East to Mexico.
Pirate interventions in Poland are considered particularly revolting as they did not take place in any autocratic repressive system, but in a member state of the European Union.
Amnesty International’s director for Poland Anna Blaszczak accused in a statement on Friday that the opposition surveillance was in line with the behavior of the Polish government of the Law and Justice Party. The EU has repeatedly criticized Poland for interfering with the justice system and other actions perceived as anti-democratic.
“These revelations are shocking, but not unexpected. “They raise serious concerns not only for politicians, but for the entire Polish civil society, in particular because of the context of the government’s history against human rights and the rule of law,” said Blaszczak.voa.
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