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Software Government

Ruling Party Figures Say Poland Has Pegasus Spyware (reuters.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD from the tools-of-the-trade dept.
Senior figures in the Polish government indicated on Friday that the country had bought sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, but denied that it had been used against political opponents. Reuters reports: Reports from the Associated Press that NSO Group's Pegasus software was used to hack the phones of government critics, including a senator who ran the election campaign for the largest opposition party in 2019, have led to accusations that special services are undermining democratic norms. Government figures had previously declined to comment on whether or not Poland has access to Pegasus, citing laws on official secrets. In December, a deputy defense minister said Poland did not use Pegasus. However, in extracts from an interview with conservative weekly Sieci published on Friday, the leader of Poland's ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS) indicated that Polish services had the software.

"Pegasus is a program that is used by services combating crime and corruption in many countries...It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool," Jaroslaw Kaczynski [leader of the Law and Justice party] was quoted as saying. He rejected opposition claims that Pegasus had been used against political opponents as "utter nonsense." Asked about Pegasus during a news conference, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said it would be a "disgrace" if Polish services did not have access to such surveillance technology.
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Ruling Party Figures Say Poland Has Pegasus Spyware

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  • djen dobry (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @08:01PM (#62154093) Homepage
    Poland has descended into a right wing, Holy Roman shithole. The Catholic Church operates like a Mafia gang. Most ordinary people are under the spell of ideologues and state media and vote accordingly.
    • 1989 wasn't so long ago ... maybe it's time for Eastern Europe to remember?

    • Re:djen dobry (Score:4, Informative)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @09:13PM (#62154237)

      I think the far-right leanings of Poland and its strong religious beliefs are not completely causative. Other countries are traditionally very catholic like Spain, Portugal have nearly zero far-right, and both are currently governed by leftist parties. Italy is obviously catholic but has been governed by both left, right and populists.

      Here some considerations on very recent oppositions between the Catholic Church (the Pope in Vatican, and the Polish Catholic hierarchy) and the far-right government of Poland.

      • * The Pope in visit to Hungary has called the bishops to "embrace diversity" https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com] which has been read in the press as referring to either or both of: foreign cultures and gay rights. It was not more specific due to diplomatic precautions, but anyway this is very much the contrary of the message that the Polish government wants to pass.
      • * The Pope has called to vaccination as an "act of love" https://www.npr.org/sections/c... [npr.org] , while Poland is much below EU average in terms of the covid vaccination (Poland 56%, EU 70%). This has been correlated to the far right in Poland https://www.dw.com/en/anti-vac... [dw.com] while other countries where Catholics are majority are above EU average (Italy 74%, Belgium 75%, Ireland 77%, Spain 81%, Portugal 90% https://ourworldindata.org/exp... [ourworldindata.org])
      • * The Church hierarchy in Poland has positioned itself in favour of greeting the refugees (muslims...), which is a very bold move against the Polish government. The Catholic Church of Poland has settled camps to help the migrants and is asking for money to help them https://notesfrompoland.com/20... [notesfrompoland.com]

      • Polish ruling party is extreme left, at least when it comes to economy and one-party rule. It's far right only socially and for rhetoric. In other words, it's national-communist. They keep raising taxes and borrow with abandon, give handouts to the idle poor, spew propaganda about banks and companies being all evil, and so on.

        As for oppositions between Polish church and the govt, there's none. The Polish church hierarchy is deeply in bed with the ruling party, taking massive amounts of money, land, buil

        • The PiS classifies itself as right in Poland "United Right" coalition and is member of the "European Conservatives & Reformists Party" (in which the US Republican party is associate member).

          When you say they are left, what you might be seeing the effect that "extreme meets", meaning aspects of far-left and far-right end up the same, and the modern politics is much more center/extreme rather than left/right.

          I agree with you the national Catholic Church chapters do not care much what the Pope says, region

          • is much more center/extreme rather than left/right

            PiS is about as far from centrism as possible. The left/right spectrum is a circle not a line, and PiS, being a mix of Gomulka-style communism and far right, is on the very opposite side.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Indeed. Probably keeping tabs on what two adults are doing with their genitals.

    • Can you give some "gang" examples?

  • Pegasus Watergate (Score:3)

    by kiviQr ( 3443687 ) on Friday January 07, 2022 @11:50PM (#62154457)
    From multiple reports they used it during elections to intercept messages of political opponents. If judicial branch wasn't controlled by government election results would have been invalidated.
  • "Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said it would be a "disgrace" if Polish services did not have access to such surveillance technology."

    "Countries identified by Israel as authoritarian regimes have disappeared from the list. So Poland was placed next to countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Mexico and Hungary. Apparently, it was considered too dangerous to hand over such a powerful surveillance tool to representatives of countries where it would be difficult to effectively c
  • And Mossad has backdoored Pegasus :]

  • If liberal policies favor a larger more powerful central government while (US) conservative policies would allocate more power to the state and individual level, then by definition authoritarian dictatorships cannot be conservative. Or, said another way, forget the labels liberal and conservative because they tend to just elicit unhelpful defensive, reflexive responses and consider that - Authoritarian regimes and dictatorships necessarily must always originate from political environments that favor large

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