Right wing Polish leader used Israeli spyware on political opponents, jurnalists

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Last edited Fri Jan 7, 2022, 12:30 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-01-07/poland-admits-bought-powerful-israeli-pegasus-spyware

WARSAW —

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

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 said the use of such spyware arose in response to the growing use of encryption to mask data in transit, which defeated earlier monitoring technologies. By hacking phones, where the data have been de-encrypted, it lets authorities monitor communications as well as real-time conversations.

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The admissions by Kaczynski in the interview follow 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.

On Thursday, Amnesty International independently verified the finding by Citizen Lab that Polish Sen. Krzysztof Brejza’s phone 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.

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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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