Polish Pegasus drama

You’re likely familiar with Pegasus – a spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that is designed to be covertly and remotely installed on mobile phones running iOS and Android. While NSO Group markets Pegasus as a product for fighting crime and terrorism, governments around the world have routinely used the spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, political dissidents, and human rights activists.

Well, Pegasus is taking center stage in Poland now. It’s a strange story with lots of twists and turns, as many of these Polish stories are.

Indeed, that was allegedly the case with the previous Polish (PiS, Law and Justice) government using Pegasus to illegally spy on people. Apparently, it got so bad that Apple warned an opposition prosecutor at the time, among others, that a state-sponsored spying on their phone was taking place.

Currently, there are investigations ongoing and even a commission has been set up to find out who’s responsible for what. I wonder if they are actually going to find out anything useful. Not holding my breath, but who knows.

There was also a spooky episode a few years ago in Poland, where prominent members of the public got phone calls from, mostly, their loved ones’ numbers telling them that a particular loved one, who has just called them, is dead, and so on. The numbers were obviously spoofed. It’s unclear who was behind it. As far as I know, there were/are no viable suspects, apart from the usual suspects (Russia, and so on), but no way to prove that, apparently.

While Poland is a medium-sized country in Europe that doesn’t shake the world, its political scene is rather colorful with ties to all sorts of interesting people across the world. And the Israeli connection is definitely there.