Claudia CiobanuWarsawBIRNMarch 3, 202313:15Jacek Karnowski, a politician key to the liberal opposition’s campaign for the 2019 general elections, was spied on by intelligence services using Pegasus, Gazeta Wyborcza revealed on Friday.
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Jacek Karnowski, currently mayor of Sopot on Poland’s Baltic Sea coast, was monitored by state surveillance in 2018-2019 when he was one of the key politicians promoting an opposition alliance to win the Senate elections, according to Friday’s daily Gazeta Wyborcza. (The united opposition did win the Senate in 2019).
“This is a violation of privacy and human dignity,” Karnowski told Wyborcza in response to the revelations. “Those who monitored their political opponents should be brought before the Tribunal of the State.”
Wyborcza says it found Karnowski’s name on a list of monitored individuals made available to multiple media outlets that were part of the Pegasus Project consortium.
According to the paper, the Polish Central Anti-Corruption Bureau CBA tapped Karnowski’s phone 10 to 20 times between 2018 and 2019.
It is impossible to say what data the services took from Karnowski’s phone, Wyborcza reports, because the device was “cleaned up” of data.
In Poland, secret services are obliged to delete data they collect if they do not uncover or confirm a crime during the investigation.
Karnowski is currently head of an alliance of mayors that is a major actor in the coalition of liberal opposition parties confronting the ruling PiS in this year’s parliamentary elections, due in the autumn.
Polish intelligence services used Pegasus until November 2021, after which the Israeli company producing the software, NSO Group, did not renew its contracts with either Poland or Hungary.
This followed media revelations that these two governments used the spyware to monitor journalists and opposition politicians.
Source link: balkaninsight.com
