New attempt by those spied on with the Pegasus program to unravel the opacity in which the infiltration of their mobile phones remains. Lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, a lawyer for ERC and Oriol Junqueras and spied on in 2020, has asked the court to charge three founders and directors of the Israeli firm NSO Group through the group’s subsidiary in Luxembourg.
The petition to the court is an attempt to try to ensure that the case does not end in a dead end given the lack of collaboration of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and Israel, and it occurs in parallel to a European campaign by dozens of human rights entities. , among them Amnesty International or the Irídia center, to demand that the European Union prohibit the use of spyware and sanction the Luxembourg subsidiary of the Israeli group.
An expert report provided to the court by Irídia, whose lawyer Brian Ventura represents Van den Eynde, has discovered new subsidiaries of the Israeli group in Luxembourg. Other spied on independentists had already asked to direct the investigations to this European country, but the judge in their case (the Pegasus investigation is spread across half a dozen courts in Barcelona) has refused.
The three directors who are asked to be charged are Yuval Somekh; company director during the period in which Van den Eynde was spied on; Omri Lavie, co-founder of the company and who remains on its board of directors; and Shalev Hulio, co-founder of NSO Group and CEO until 2022. Before founding the company, he was commander of the Civil Defense command of the Israeli Army.
If his indictment is agreed upon, it would be the first time that a Spanish court formally investigates the businessmen who sold the spy program. Some of the directors have already appeared before the US Justice.
“Spying on a lawyer means completely breaking the rules of the game, since their cases are protected by professional secrecy and the interference may have accessed their clients’ information,” recalled the director of the Irídia center, Anaïs Franquesa.
For her part, Júlia Pérez, from Amnesty International, has denounced that Pegasus is “a tool of mass surveillance that violates human rights.”
Shir Hever, an independent international researcher, has explained that the current third version of Pegasus uses artificial intelligence to download all the information from mobile phones and connect the camera and microphone without the affected person realizing it. “It is a lethal weapon,” he stressed.
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