According to the director of the country’s secret service, they are eighteen to have been monitored “legally”.
Le Monde with afp
The owner of Spanish secret services, Paz Esteban, admitted Thursday, May 5, that Catalan separatists had been spied on by Madrid via PEGASUS spy software, but ensures that this surveillance was carried out in a legal framework.
First woman named at the head of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Paz Esteban was questioned for almost four hours by the parliamentary committee of “official secrets”, united behind closed doors. According to members of this commission, such as number two of the People’s Party (PP, right), Cuca Gamarra, M me Esteban recognized that separatists had been spied on by his services, but still with the green light from justice. According to Spanish media, parliamentarians were able to consult mandates issued by a judge authorizing monitoring of some of the separatists targeted by Pegasus.
The intelligence services said, according to several media, that eighteen separatists were affected, much less than the figure mentioned in a report by the Canadian organization Citizen Lab, whose publication in mid-April triggered A crisis between the government of Pedro Sanchez and the separatists. Citizen Lab claims to have identified more than sixty people from the separatist movement whose laptops would have been hacked between 2017 and 2020 by the PEGASUS spy software, created by the Israeli company NSO Group.
According to M me esteban, the forty other activists could have been targeted either “by a foreign government”, or by Spanish security agencies “having exceeded the legal limits”. The day before, during a parliamentary public hearing, the Minister of Defense had nevertheless assured that any electronic surveillance conducted in Spain was done within the limits of the law.
political scandal
This spy scandal took a new turn with the announcement on Monday by the government that Mr. Sanchez and his Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, Minister of CNI supervision, had been spied on in May and June 2021 via This same software.
The Spanish government has refused to attribute these computer attacks precisely, confining itself to ensuring that these were “external” attacks. The main suspect of these high -level hacks is Moroccan intelligence: they took place in the heart of the violent diplomatic crisis between Spain and Morocco on the subject of Moroccan migrants, in 2021. The Consortium forbidden Stories and Le Monde had revealed in July 2021 that Morocco had used Pegasus to very largely target lawyers, journalists or human rights activists in multiple countries, including France, Algeria and Spain; Rabat, for his part, claims to have never used spy software. The possibility of an action carried out by the own Spanish services has also been mentioned by part of the Spanish press.
This double scandal sparked a major political crisis in Spain, where Mr. Sanchez’s coalition government depends on the votes of Catalan separatists. The position of the director of the CNI appears more and more fragile: still supported by the Minister of Defense, Paz Esteban is in the viewfinder of Catalan separatists and the radical left -wing formation Podemos, partner of the socialists in the government.
The current Catalan regional president, Pere Aragonès, who is among the spying persons, thus claimed on Thursday evening his resignation, demanding the immediate declassification of the documents which allowed this espionage to be put in place.
Particularly intrusive, Pegasus allows, once installed on a phone, to collect all of the data stored there, including messages exchanged via secure applications. According to Spanish services, approximately 2.7 gigabytes of data were taken from Mr. Sanchez’s phone after piracy.