Almost 600 people targeted with Pegasus spyware under former Polish government

Almost 600 people in Poland were targeted for surveillance with Pegasus spyware between 2017 and 2022 under the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, the justice minister in the current government has revealed.

Meanwhile, the minister in charge of the security services says that, although many legitimate targets were surveilled, there were “too many cases” in which Pegasus was used against figures simply “inconvenient” for the former government.

When Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s new government took office in December, it pledged to investigate alleged abuses of Pegasus – a powerful Israeli-made tool that allows monitoring of mobile phones – and to hold those responsible to account.

In February, a special parliamentary committee was established to look into use of the spyware. The following month, it called PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński as its first witness.

Separately, prosecutors have also been investigating the issue. Earlier this month, they sent notices to 31 people informing them that they had been granted witness status in the case investigating the abuse of power and breach of duty by public officials in the use of Pegasus.

Among them is Krzysztof Brejza, a politician from Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) party who was targetted by Pegasus while he was PO’s election campaign manager in 2019, at a time when it was the main opposition to the then PiS government.

Yesterday, Adam Bodnar, who serves as justice minister and public prosecutor general in Tusk’s government, announced that those notified by prosecutors were just the “first group” and more would later be included.

He also handed the speakers of both chambers of parliament a document outlining the extent of the use of Pegasus after it was purchased by the then PiS government in 2017.

Bodnar informed them that, between 2017 and 2022, the security services applied “end device operational surveillance” to 578 individuals, reports news website Wirtualna Polska.

Today, the spokeswoman for the prosecutor general’s office, Anna Adamiak, confirmed to Wirtualna Polska that those individuals were surveilled using Pegasus (though that spyware is not named directly in the report handed to the speakers of parliament).

This morning, the minister in charge of the security services, Tomasz Siemoniak, likewise told broadcaster TVN that “over 500 people” had been subjected to surveillance using Pegasus under the former government.

Siemoniak refused to say whether this group was dominated by politicians and other people against whom use of the software appeared unjustified.

“There are certainly legitimate cases: suspicion of terrorism, counter-intelligence activities, I don’t argue with that,” said the minister. “However, the temptation for politicians to use it against inconvenient politicians, lawyers, judges, prosecutors was too great…There were too many [such] cases.”

But Siemoniak also confirmed that, in all cases investigated, courts had authorised the use of the software, as they are required to do. But, he added, “prosecutors are investigating whether these authorisations were extorted…and whether the judges were always aware what tool would be used in a given case”.

Senior PiS figures, including Kaczyński, have always insisted that the spyware was used legally and against legitimate targets.

However, last year, a European Parliament inquiry found that Poland had used Pegasus as part of “a system for the surveillance of the opposition and critics of the government – designed to keep the ruling majority and the government in power”.

Soon after, a commission established by the Polish Senate found that the PiS government’s purchase of Pegasus was illegal and that its use against opposition figures rendered the 2019 elections unfair.

In December, a court ordered state broadcaster TVP to apologise to Brejza and pay him 200,000 zloty in compensation for publishing private messages taken from his phone using Pegasus spyware. Under the PiS government, TVP was a party mouthpiece regularly used to attack the opposition.

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Main image credit: Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.