Hungarian News

And Now Poland

• January 9, 2022
• István
• 1 Comment

The chairman of Polish PiS Jarosław Kaczyński has admitted that Poland is in possession of the espionage software Pegasus and thus contradicted many earlier representations his government telling this would be “fake news”. This product of NSO offers technical advantages over others and enables the monitoring of encrypted text messages, said Kaczyński of the weekly newspaper “Sieci”. “It would be a bad thing if the Polish intelligence services would not have a tool like this,” Kaczyński said ►EN.

On Thursday, the AP news agency reported that three Polish government critics had been spied on with Pegasus. It concerns the opposition politician Krzysztof Brejza, the lawyer and former PiS minister Roman Giertych and prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek ►HU. Brejza led the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign in 2019. Text messages were stolen from his phone, manipulated, and broadcast by regime-controlled television networks as part of a smear campaign at the height of the election campaign, which Kaczyński’s party narrowly won. The Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, which specialised in data protection and online espionage, made the these findings public.

PM Mateusz Morawiecki rejected the findings of Citizen Lab and AP as being false reports and claimed that foreign secret services were behind the spying attacks ►EN. Deputy minister of defence Wojciech Skurkiewicz asserted in the end of December that Polish services did not have use of the Pegasus program at all. “It is not used to track or monitor anyone in our country,” he said at that time.

The television station TVN (we remember that the government wanted to ban this critical station from Poland as foreign owned until the president Andrzej Duda vetoed the law) and the countries 2nd largest newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Poland bought Pegasus back in 2017 and paid for it with funds from the so-called Justice Fund, which is supposed to support crime victims and contribute to the rehabilitation of criminals. The program is used by the anti-corruption office, which is no independent body, but under the control of the government ►EN.

In the meanwhile the Israelis limited the sale of Pegasus to 37 countries, both Poland and Hungary are no longer allowed to purchase licences ►HU.

The opposition drew comparisons to the US Watergate scandal in the 1970s, in which the government tried to spy out election campaign plans of the opposition. In Poland a parliamentary committee of inquiry was called for. Donald Tusk, former PM, former president of the EU council, and today leader of the largest opposition party, called this the “most serious crisis of democracy since the fall of communism.” ►FR.

Kaczyński denied that Pegasus played a role in the 2019 election campaign. “There is nothing here, no facts, just opposition hysteria,” he said. There was no surveillance. Pegasus was bought with public money to fight crime and protect citizens. That is why there is no need for a committee of inquiry. “They lost because they lost,” said Kaczyński, looking at the opposition’s election result. “You shouldn’t be looking for such excuses today.” After manipulating everything this excuse also could have come from Orbán.