The National Court authorized the infiltration of a computer program spy on the mobile phone of David Fernández, activist and former CUP deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia, to investigate him within the Democratic Tsunami case, according to the summary documentation to which EL PAÍS has had access. The Central Court of Instruction 6, headed by Judge Manuel García-Castellón, approved the measure in mid-January 2020, within a broad intervention of communications requested by the Civil Guard at that time and which included other former political leaders, such as Albano Dante, former leader of Podemos in Catalonia, and also former CUP deputy Quim Arrufat. At that time, agents had just begun their investigation into the protests driven by the Tsunamic Democratic movement following the October 2019 Supreme Court ruling that condemned the political leaders of the processes for the illegal 1-O referendum two years earlier.
David Fernández, Albano Dante and Quim Arrufat have not been charged in this open case with terrorism crimes, and their names do not appear in the final report of the armed institute incorporated into the summary last November. The judge does not mention them either in the order issued a few weeks ago to charge a dozen suspects: among them, the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira.
He software spy was never completely installed on Fernández's cell phone due to “technical problems”, according to what the Civil Guard informed the National Court, although there are reports with the content of some of his conversations, since his calls were intercepted through the Telecommunications Legal Interception System (Sitel). The former Catalan deputy considers what happened as “a total assault on my privacy and intimacy, without any type of filter or limit” and announces that he is considering taking legal measures. Fernández describes what is now known as “a major scandal because it is not one person, but hundreds of people who are tracked, monitored, spied on for their political activity or their ideas.”
Several reports included in the summary reveal that, in December 2019, the Civil Guard targeted Fernández and Dante, and asked the court to intercept their telephone calls. To justify an initiative of such significance, the agents pointed out the former CUP deputy who had participated in one of the first concentrations called by Tsunami in October of that year; that he retweeted messages from the movement during the blockade of the El Prat airport (Barcelona) and during the following days; and that he had used the expression “democratic tsunami” five years earlier: “Of special relevance is the first public use by David Fernández, in November 2014, of the concept, regarding the first illegal self-determination consultation.” On November 9 of that year, the then CUP deputy told the media about the illegal self-determination consultation that day: “This is a democratic tsunami against a demophobic State.”
The agents, who came to describe the former parliamentarian as the “ideologist” and “initiator” of Tsunami, emphasized in their reports that Fernández had used that expression more times. “On February 26, 2019, he published a tweet haranguing a person accused by the Supreme Court, Jordi Cuixart, in which he stated: 'Democratic Tsunami always' […] On September 15, 2019, during the presentation of a book in Barcelona, [dijo] that 'a tsunami is an imperceptible wave that no one has been able to detect, that cooks underground and that takes on a speed of propagation and intensity in a moment, that no one can stop.' The Civil Guard report also linked Fernández with Arnaldo Otegi, “detained for belonging to the terrorist organization ETA, politician from Sortu (radical left) and current general coordinator of EH Bildu, whom he visited when he was interned in the Logroño penitentiary center.” And the researchers also highlighted that the platform's signature In peu de pau appeared on the poster that served as a call to “go” to the airport blockade: “And David Fernández was one of its creators.”
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To request that Albano Dante's phones be tapped, the Civil Guard emphasized its closeness to the independence movement – “it shows fervent support for any initiative that promulgates thesis of civil disobedience within the global secessionist strategy”; who intervened in a Tsunami event in November 2019; that, almost a year before, he traveled twice to Brussels (on December 12, 2018 and on February 16, 2019), where the escaped former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont was; that he tweeted many messages about the platform; and that he had made inquiries to a computer scientist who was supposedly behind the platform (who is also not on the final list of defendants). “His involvement and his driving and coordinating nature are evident,” the armed institute argued about the former Podemos parliamentarian.
The Civil Guard, which had already tapped several phones in its investigations into an alleged organ called Catalan CNI, requested in December 2019 to tap phone lines in the name of Fernández (two numbers, although one turned out to be that of an insurance company worker), Dante (which included cell phones belonging to his wife and two children), Arrufat and five other people, including the businessman Joan Matamala. This initiative was supported by the Prosecutor's Office and approved by Alejandro Abascal, then reinforcement magistrate of Central Court 6.
Already in January 2020, the agents want to go further and ask to infiltrate a “Trojan” in five of them (David Fernández and Joan Matamala, among them, but not Dante) through the SILC subplatform, a Sitel tool created in 2008 so that communications monitoring included not only traditional voice calls. To do this, they request to install a “software that allows, remotely and telematically, the remote examination and without the user's knowledge of the content of the terminals.” This will allow access, among other information, to the “contact book”; the “video call or call record”; “the email account associated with the terminal”, “stored files”; the “web browsing history”. They also claim to be able to activate the device's microphone to “capture oral communications” from the environment.
With the support of the public ministry, the court then gives the green light to the installation of this spy program on all of them (although it limits access to the microphone) and the extraction of data for a month. An interference that was extended in February until mid-March. It was then that they began to have reservations about continuing down that path. The prosecutor opposes continuing to tap the phones of former deputies in the absence of new evidence—since the Civil Guard reports, for example, that during the last period it has not detected calls from Fernández of “interest for the investigation”—. The court agrees with him and lifts the interventions. Despite this, the armed institute will still insist in May of that year that, in its opinion, the former CUP deputy “would be one of the main ideologues” of Tsunami and leaves open the possibility of later requesting measures to intervene again. communications if “significant changes appear in the development of the investigation that directly affect it.”
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