Technology of israeli cyber espionage to fight crime and terrorism used to monitor Catalan pro-independence politicians. Is about pegasus, a tool sold “exclusively” to governments with which, according to the newspapers ‘El País’ and ‘The Guardian’, the cell phones of the ‘president’ of the Parliament of Catalonia were hacked, Roger Torrentand the deputy of the CUP, anna gabriel, exiled in Switzerland. Now it has also been known that a total of sixty pro-independence leaders were spied on, including the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès.
Pegasus is a spyware program developed by the Israeli company NSO Group. This tool has been acquired by up to 45 governments around the world, which then assign the Army and the Police to persecute criminals. Although its use by Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Uganda is known, the company has refused to confirm whether the Spanish Executive has also done so.
The attack on Torrent occurred between April and May 2019, when the PSOE from Pedro Sanchez ruled in the minority and when he testified before the Supreme Court as a witness in the trial of the process. The ‘president’ of the Parliament has not hesitated to point to the Spanish State while NSO refuses to clarify whether Madrid is its client for reasons of “confidentiality”. According to the investigation, the CNI and the National Police did have until 2015 the services of their competition, the Italian Hacking Team.
CYBER PARASITE
Pegasus snuck into Torrent’s cell phone and 130 others through a security breach of WhatsApp. Victims can receive a message, a call or a video call. Even if they don’t answer the phone, they use that connection to install a malware —software malicious—in the bowels of the device.
Once inside the mobile, Pegasus can read messages, activate the camera and microphone to spy on their owners (also in encrypted calls), access the hard drive and take screenshots, as revealed by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity group from the University of Toronto. Although there is no proof of this, the Israeli company boasts of being able to sneak into the servers of giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.
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The use of this espionage tool has led WhatsApp to file a complaint against NSO Group in the United States for violating human rights with the hacking of more than 1,400 mobile phones belonging to politicians, journalists and social activists. The Israeli company denies having any responsibility for the use that governments give to its tool, but WhatsApp insists on this and points out that NSO servers monitor and update Pegasus once it is implanted in mobiles. Amnesty International has also joined that demand.
This is not the first time that Pegasus has been seen in the eye of the hurricane. In 2018 the regime of Saudi Arabia used this technology to break into the mobile of the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post. In the case of Torrent it was with a missed video call; in Bezos’s, a message with a video. With this operation, the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed bin Salmán, tried to blackmail the American businessman to silence the murder of the dissident journalist jamal khashoggi. Now it has been used to spy on the Catalan independence movement.