In statements made today to the EFE agency, John Scott-Railton stressed that this is the first time that the program manufactured by the Israeli company is used against European officials, writes the Portuguese Agency today.
The mobile phones of politicians like Roger Torrent, president of the Parliament of the Spanish Autonomous Region of Catalonia; Anna Gabril, leader of the Catholic Party Candidatura dUnitat Popular (CUP); and the Generalitat Public Administration Advisor, Jorgi Puigner, suffered intrusions through the use of the Pegasus program of the Israeli company NSO Group.
The Canadian-based non-governmental organization Citizen Lab was the first to report that the program sold by the Israeli company allows messages to be intercepted through applications that encrypt communications by accessing mobile phone content.
Pegasus was used to monitor journalists, lawyers, researchers, politicians and activists in Mexico. Specifically, the organization CitizenLabrevelated last year that the Pegasus program was used to attack the phone of the wife of journalist Javier Valdez Crdenas a week before he was murdered, on May 15, 2017.
According to Scott-Railton, head of Citizen La's investigation, the case of Spanish politicians monitored through the same program, which was revealed this week by the newspapers El Pais and The Guardian, only a part of the infiltrations that took place in 2019.
In total, Citizen Lab, the main source of news for El Pais and The Guardian, detected 1,400 surveillance cases through an intrusion in the application of WhatsApp messages.
Number of politicians under surveillance may be higher
Although the cases about Torrent, Gabriel and others were released this week, Scott-Railton pointed out that Spanish politicians were contacted by the company WhatsApp and by the Citizen Lab itself in 2019 who informed them that they had been victims of intruders through Pegasus.
This case is worrisome, in part, because it indicates that the industry's espionage program discourse only sells it to governments and that it expects states to behave in a very weak manner. It also reaffirms that the industry cannot be trusted to be honest when asked for information on how it uses (espionage) technology, said Scott-Railton EFE.
Asked if among the 1,400 cases discovered by the company WhatsApp are more Spanish politicians, Scott-Railton replied that at the moment he is limited to what he can say.
I cannot comment on cases that are not public, but I can confirm that Citizen Lab continues to actively investigate this whole case, he said.
How Pegasus works and how it infiltrates mobile phones
The Canadian investigator warned that, despite the vulnerability of the WhatsApp application, which allowed the introduction of the spy program on mobile phones of 1,400 people, the flaw was quickly repaired by the company.
It is admitted that there were people who were attacked before and after that period because customers of the Pegasus program had other ways to attack the phones, he stressed that the espionage program has multiple ways to exercise surveillance from a technical point of view.
The Pegasust program uses many ways to infiltrate a device. There are cases, as in Mexico, that deceives an individual to follow a certain link. In cases that have already been revealed by Amnesty International it appears that the infection is injected into the phone without the user's own interaction, but rather through the actions of the operator, he explained.
Scott-Railton also said that although NSOGroupapen only sells Pegasus to state governments or security services, it is certain that the espionage program has not been facilitated by regional governments.
Pegasus is sold exclusively to governments and the sale is authorized by the Ministry of Defense of Israel. In that sense as a weapon. There is a process to certify the seller, so whenever there is a case of spying through Pegasus, the fingerprints point to a government, he said.
It is possible for the company to sell the program to a regional government. There are cases where we don't know the customers. Usually the federal customer. But NSOGroup was trying to sell Pegasusa police bodies from SanDiego and Los Angeles in the United States, he added.
