Spyware seen from Spain and Israel

In Spain, Catalonia declared a moratorium on the Pegasus software in early April, after Catalan separatists were spied on for several years by the Spanish secret services via this cyber surveillance tool.

>> Project Pegasus: spyware used by states to target politicians, journalists, lawyers… including French people

Once installed in a mobile phone, Pegasus makes it possible to spy on the user of the device, accessing their messages, their data, or activating the device remotely for the purpose of capturing sound or images. It has been used in many countries, as revealed by the Cellule investigation de Radio France in 2021, after an extensive investigation carried out by a consortium of 17 international media on the basis of data obtained by the organization Forbidden Stories and by Amnesty International.

While cases related to this spyware are still far from unraveled, a second surveillance tool, QuaDream, also designed by an Israeli company, was used to spy on journalists and political figures around the world, revealed Tuesday 11 April the Canadian research laboratory Citizen Lab.