The poll was commissioned by the wpolityce.pl website, which published the results on Sunday, the state PAP news agency reported.
Social Changes, a pollster, asked the respondents the following question: “Should the security services and the anti-corruption agencies have access to modern IT systems which would allow them to obtain information from electronic devices used by people suspected of criminal activity? For instance, systems which would allow them to read information from smartphone messaging-applications?”
More than a half of those asked, 53 percent, replied in the affirmative, with 21 percent saying “definitely yes” and 32 percent “I think so.”
Meanwhile, 27 percent responded in the negative, with 15 percent saying “definitely not” and 12 percent “I don't think so.”
The remaining 20 percent of respondents had no opinion on the matter, wpolityce.pl reported.
The survey was carried out between January 21 and 24, 2022, on a nationwide representative sample of 1,075 Polish people, the website said.
Spyware reports
It comes in the wake of reports by the AP news agency that several people in Poland were hacked with the powerful Pegasus spyware from Israel’s NSO group.
The alleged targets include former Deputy Prime Minister Roman Giertych and Krzysztof Brejza, a senior politician with the opposition Civic Platform (PO) party, according to researchers from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Earlier this month, Poland’s opposition-controlled Senate (upper house of parliament) set up an inquiry into the matter.
Meanwhile, the spokesman for Poland’s security services last week rejected claims that the conservative government in Warsaw used illegal surveillance methods against its political opponents.
Stanisław Żaryn said that in Poland “operational control is conducted where appropriate as prescribed by law, upon the consent of the Prosecutor General's Office followed by a court’s decision,” PAP reported.
'Utter nonsense'
Also in January, 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)
Source: PAP