According to Polish Deputy Prime Minister, the software is used to fight “against crime and corruption”. It rejects the accusations of use against political opposition.
Le Monde with AFP
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of law and justice (ECB), the nationalist party in Poland, admitted that his country had bought the Israeli pegasus espionage software, according to excerpts from an interview published on Friday 7 January . Mr. Kaczynski, however, dismissed the charges that Pegasus was used against political opposition.
These charges regarding the use of this software rocked Poland in recent weeks. The scandal sparked comparisons with the Watergate scandal survey, which led to the resignation of the President of the United States Richard Nixon in 1974.
Installed in a mobile phone, Pegasus provides access to messaging and user data, but also activate the device remotely to capture the sound or image. “It would be bad that Polish services do not have this type of tool,” said Kaczynski, who is also deputy prime minister, to the weekly century . Asked whether the government would have used the software to spy on the opposition, Mr. Kaczynski assured that this program was “used by crime and corruption services in many countries”.
“An authoritative slip”
In the interview, which must be published on Monday, he pointed out that any use of this tool was “always under the control of a court and the Office of the Prosecutor”. He rejected the accusations of the opposition in block, qualifying them from “a lot of noise for nothing”.
Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity monitoring laboratory headquartered in Canada, confirmed the use of Pegasus against three people in Poland, including Krzysztof Brejza, senator of the main opposition formation, civic platform (PO), while coordinating his campaign in the legislative elections in 2019.
John Scott-Railton, Senior Researcher in Citizen Lab, said earlier at the France-Presse agency (AFP) that the detected uses of Pegasus were only “the tip of the iceberg” and that its use showed “an authoritarian shift” in Poland. According to Mr. Brejza, the hacking of his phone has influenced the outcome of the poll, won by the Worse.
For Mr. Kaczynski, the opposition “lost because she lost”. “No Pegasus, no service, no information secretly obtained, of any kind, has played the slightest role in the 2019 election campaign,” he said.
Contact by AFP, the Israeli owner of Pegasus, NSO Group, said he sold only “to legitimate bodies to apply, who use these systems in the context of mandates. to fight against criminals, terrorists and corruption “.