The independentists spied on with the Pegasus program look towards California. Specifically, in the case that in that North American state has condemned the Israeli group NSO, the company that sells spy software, and that may contain data of interest for the investigations that are being followed in Spain due to the lack of collaboration between Israel and the company. in the investigations.
This is stated by the lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, who represents the Irídia center, in a writing to which elDiario.es has had access. The lawyer asks the Barcelona judge investigating his infiltration to demand a complete copy of the case against NSO Group pursued in California, where statements were taken from the directors of the company that has also been requested to be charged in Spain, but whose appearance is a mystery given the obstacles that Israel has placed on the investigation.
Van den Eynde’s mobile phone was infected in May 2020, when the lawyer had to appeal denials of prison permits to his client, Oriol Junqueras. The program was able to access all the content on your phone, as well as activate your microphone. The lawyer’s entire professional and personal life contained in his cell phone was at the disposal of the organization that commissioned the Pegasus attack.
Last December, a California court convicted NSO Group, the Israeli company that created the Pegasus program, for using WhatsApp to spy on the cell phones of hundreds of people. The lawsuit was filed by Meta, owner of WhatsApp, and alleged that the Israeli company took advantage of an error in the messaging application to install the malicious program on phones.
The attempts by the pro-independence spies to obtain details from the company about the sale of its spy software to the Government or the National Intelligence Center (CNI) have so far met with silence from Israel and Luxembourg, the European country where NSO Group has a subsidiary, to the requests for collaboration from the Spanish Justice.
In his writing, Van den Eynde states that the facts investigated in the United States are those that made it possible to identify the espionage of Catalan victims, since some of the pro-independence supporters were spied on through mechanisms linked to WhatsApp messages. Furthermore, in the Californian case the founder of NSO, Shalev Hulio, and other directors and advisors of NSO Group such as Yaron Shohat, Tamir Gazneli and Terrence McGraw, whose summons in Spain seems unlikely, testified.
The conviction in California of NSO, argues Van den Eynde’s lawyer, Brian Ventura, implies that NSO’s access to mobile phones is “illegal” in itself, something that clashes with the thesis that the Prosecutor’s Office has defended until now, this That is, espionage is legally protected.
The “specific use” and characteristics of the spy program, the lawyer argues, “attack the system of fundamental rights established in Spain not only due to the constitutional context but also due to the human rights protection scheme resulting from membership in the European Union.” ”. “NSO Group is a company that sells a cyberweapon that is incompatible with Spanish legislation and human rights and, therefore, illegal in itself,” the letter adds.
The Mossos once again corroborate espionage
On the other hand, a report from the Mossos d’Esquadra has confirmed that the phone of Josep Lluís Alay, head of the office of former president Carles Puigdemont, was spied on with Pegasus since October 2019 and that at least 3.2 gigabytes were extracted. disinformation.
The report has only found a trace of infection with the Pegasus software in one of the intercepted phones, an iPhone 8, which was spied on between October 11, 2019 and June 25, 2020 and, subsequently, from June 29 2020. During those dates, the Mossos d’Esquadra add in their expert report, the infections allowed the extraction of a minimum of 3.2 gigabytes of information, without the destination of that data could be determined.
With this, there are now several expert reports from the Mossos d’Esquadra that have confirmed the spying with Pegasus uncovered by Citizen Lab on the mobile phones of several pro-independence politicians, including the former president of the Generalitat Pere Aragonès or former deputies of the CUP and ERC . In the case of Aragonès, the report provided by the Catalan police to the court corroborates that his cell phone was infected with Pegasus between July 2018 and March 2020, beyond the period in which the CNI espionage had judicial coverage.
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