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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — A prominent Catalan separatist politician said on Thursday that Spain’s top intelligence official acknowledged that “some” of the dozens of politicians whose agency has reportedly been targeted by spyware have hacked into their mobile phones, but that it has proper jurisdiction. said that. authority.
Gabriel Rufián, a member of a Catalan pro-independence party, spoke after attending a closed meeting with the director of the Spanish National Intelligence Center (CNI) and a select group of Spanish lawmakers.
A recent report by Canada-based digital rights group Citizen Lab on the use of controversial Pegasus spyware in Spain said that dozens of pro-independence supporters in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region were spied on while using the software.
When asked by the Associated Press, the Spanish Ministry of Defense responsible for the CNI declined to comment on the meeting with CNI director Paz Esteban, as its content was deemed confidential. But leading Spanish media also reported that the director showed committee members court powers to hack the cell phones of some Catalan separatists.
“They (CNI) admit to espionage, but they say it’s done against far fewer people than those cited by Citizen Lab,” Rufián said.
Regarding the rest of the more than 60 politicians, lawyers and activists identified by Citizen Lab as hacking targets, Rufián said the CNI director “pointed to two possibilities”: First, it was a foreign country; or two, government agencies spying beyond their legal boundaries.”
The highly anticipated meeting took place at the Spanish Parliament building in Madrid.
Catalan separatists, who want to create a new province around Barcelona in the north-east of Spain, directly blamed the CNI for the hacks that emerged when the Citizen Lab report was published two weeks ago.
The Spanish government has repeatedly said that the CNI cannot tap phones without prior judicial permission. At the same time, the government said the privacy law, which protects all CNI activities, prevents the agency from verifying whether it owns the spyware Pegasus sold by Israeli company NSO Group.
While representatives of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party and the opposition People’s Party exited Thursday’s meeting saying they were satisfied with Esteban’s statements, Rufián was not alone in demanding more action.
“We insist that the information we receive today be declassified for the public to know, because it affects fundamental rights,” said Albert Botran, one of the politicians Citizen Lab says is spying.
The Spanish government has promised that both the CNI and the nation’s ombudsman will investigate the Citizen Lab report.
In addition to the Catalan hacking case, Spain’s intelligence agency is facing troubling attention due to another Pegasus hacking case. Earlier this week, Spain announced that the cell phones of both prime minister Sánchez and Defense Minister Margarita Robles were infected with Pegasus spyware last year.
Although Spain refuses to point to Morocco, the dates Sánchez and Robles’ phones were hacked last year coincide with the diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
Amid back-to-back scandals, plans for a public ceremony to mark CNI’s 20th anniversary have been delayed.
Robles encouraged the Catalans to take hacking cases to court, just as the Spanish government did, to determine who was responsible.
“Only the judiciary can determine who is responsible,” Robles said on Thursday. “We can just take our cases to court and avoid charges in the meantime,” he said.
Robles appears to justify the crackdown on Catalan separatists for their role in the mostly peaceful pro-secession street protests organized via a secret social media platform. Events sometimes got out of control, resulting in clashes with the police, closure of roads and train lines, and the closure of Barcelona airport in 2019.
CNI, which oversees Spain’s cybersecurity, discovered that Sánchez’s and Robles’ phones had been hacked after going through deep scans of the devices after the breaches on the Catalans’ phones were revealed. The government had to admit that previous checks found no evidence of attacks in May and June 2021.
The digital theft of Pegasus phones has been reported and condemned in many countries. French President Emmanuel Macron has been included on Amnesty International’s list of heads of state suspected of being targeted last year.
The European Parliament has launched an investigation into the use of Pegasus in the European Union, initially to focus on Hungary and Poland. Members of the European Parliament are also included in the list of Catalans allegedly attacked.
Condemning the use of Pegasus spyware in several countries, Amnesty International demanded more transparency from Spain on Thursday.
“This committee, characterized by its secrecy and obscenity, cannot be considered an appropriate place to investigate allegations of violence against human rights,” said Esteban Beltrán, Amnesty’s director for Spain.
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