New attempt by spies with the Pegasus program to break through the opacity in which the infiltration of their mobile phones remains. Lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, lawyer for ERC and Oriol Junqueras and spied on in 2020, asked the court to indict three founders and managers of the Israeli firm NSO Group, via the group’s Luxembourg subsidiary.
The request to the court aims to ensure that the case does not end in an impasse given the lack of collaboration between the National Intelligence Center (NIC) and Israel, and it is taking place alongside a European campaign led by dozens of people. human rights defense entities, including Amnesty International and the Irídia center, to demand that the European Union ban the use of spyware and sanction the Luxembourg subsidiary of the Israeli group.
An expertise provided to the court by Irídia, whose lawyer Brian Ventura represents Van den Eynde, discovered new subsidiaries of the Israeli group in Luxembourg. Other spied on separatists had already requested that the investigation be directed to this European country, but the judge in charge of their case (the Pegasus investigation spans half a dozen courts in Barcelona) refused.
The three directors who are to be charged are Yuval Somekh; company director at the time Van den Eynde was spied on; Omri Lavie, co-founder of the company and who remains a member of its board of directors; and Shalev Hulio, co-founder of NSO Group and CEO until 2022. Before founding the company, he was commander of the Civil Defense Command of the Israeli army.
If his indictment is accepted, it would be the first time a Spanish court has formally investigated the businessmen who sold the spy program. Some directors have already appeared before American courts.
“Spying on a lawyer means completely breaking the rules of the game, since his files are protected by professional secrecy and the interference may have accessed the information of his clients,” recalled the director of the Irídia center, Anaïs Franquesa.
For her part, Júlia Pérez, of Amnesty International, denounced that Pegasus is “a tool of mass surveillance that violates human rights”.
Shir Hever, an independent international researcher, explained that the current third version of Pegasus uses artificial intelligence to download all information from mobile phones and connect the camera and microphone without the affected person realizing it. “It’s a deadly weapon,” he stressed.
