Stanisław Żaryn's statement came after the AP news agency reported that two more people in Poland, including an agrarian leader critical of the government, were hacked with the powerful Pegasus spyware from Israel’s NSO Group.
In response to the news, Żaryn said that in Poland “operational control is exercised only in justified cases” and “according to the law,” Polish state news agency PAP reported.
He added that such measures must be approved by prosecutors and based on a court decision.
Żaryn also said that “due to legal constraints,” Poland’s security services could not comment on whether specific methods of surveillance were being used and whether specific persons had been subject to them.
“Any allegations that operational methods were used for political ends are untrue,” Żaryn stated, as quoted by the PAP news agency on Tuesday.
Earlier that day, the Associated Press reported that, according to researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada, two more Poles were targeted by the powerful spyware in the past.
One of them, the 33-year-old farmer leader Michał Kołodziejczak, was allegedly hacked several times in May 2019, the AP reported.
The other alleged target was Tomasz Szwejgiert, who co-wrote a book about the head of Poland’s security services, Mariusz Kamiński.
Szwejgiert was reportedly hacked 21 times with Pegasus between March and June 2019.
The intrusions allegedly began “after he and his collaborators sent questions to the Polish government about Kamiński,” the AP reported.
Meanwhile, Żaryn wrote on Twitter that Szwejgiert "was arrested twice" and faced "charges in a criminal cases regarding economic crime and corruption."
Spyware reports
The spyware allegations first surfaced in December when the AP reported that in 2019 Krzysztof Brejza, a senior politician with Poland's opposition Civic Platform (PO) party, was hacked with Pegasus.
According to the Citizen Lab, which researches digital surveillance, Brejza’s phone was digitally broken into 33 times between April and October 2019 when he ran his party’s parliamentary election campaign.
Citizen Lab researchers earlier said that former Polish Deputy Prime Minister Roman Giertych and prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek had also been put on surveillance with NSO software.
In the wake of these findings, an inquiry into spyware use was set up in the opposition-controlled Senate in mid-January.
Government officials have repeatedly stated that no public agency had broken the law in this matter and that state surveillance, if any, had been conducted lawfully.
'Utter nonsense'
Earlier this month, Poland's conservative leader Jarosław Kaczyński, a deputy prime minister, was quoted as saying in a media interview that the creation and use of Pegasus reflected “technological change, such as the rise of encrypted messaging applications” and added that “it would be bad if Polish authorities did not possess this type of tool.”
At the same time, Kaczyński, who heads Poland's governing Law and Justice (PiS) party, said that Pegasus had not been used against the opposition, calling such claims “utter nonsense.”
In late December, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed accusations by the opposition over Pegasus, warning against "a spiral of fake news."
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP