Polish leader admits country bought powerful Israeli spyware (Pegasus)

[Eugene]

Earlier DU thread: Rights group verifies Polish senator was hacked with spyware

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Source: Associated Press

Polish leader admits country bought powerful Israeli spyware

By VANESSA GERA
January 7, 2022

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s most powerful politician has acknowledged that the country bought advanced spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group, but denied that it was being used to target his political opponents.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party, Law and Justice, said in an interview that the software, Pegasus, is now being used by secret services in many countries to combat crime and corruption. He noted that Pegasus represents a technological advancement over earlier monitoring systems, which did not allow the services to monitor encrypted messages.

“It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool,” Kaczynski said in an interview to be published in the Monday edition of the weekly “Sieci,” excerpts of which were published Friday by the wPolityce.pl news portal.

The interview follows exclusive reports by The Associated Press that Citizen Lab, a cyber watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that three Polish government critics were hacked with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-software-spyware-jaroslaw-kaczynski-0c41a504e8fbdbb6b9b06f6869848a48

[peppertree]

1. Pegasus in fact has been sold to a number of RW authoritarians - whom Nutty-yahoo actively promoted

One of the first well-known cases was that of Argentina's Macri.

Macri famously used Pegasus in 2017 to air private photos of once supportive media figures who had turned on him (dick pics and such).

He had to be more discreet afterward - but reputedly holds hundreds of files on, especially, his allies (keep your friends close, and all that).

He also, of course, used more traditional methods - namely using Argentina's "Intelligence" (think Hoover-style phone-tapping and mics/cams in air vents).

But as it stands right now, he's likely to skate on all charges - thanks to having stacked the Buenos Aires appellate courts when he was in office.

Cheeto taught him well.

Thanks for posting this, Eugene - and a (belated) Happy New Year. All the Best.