Poland's government is in trouble. One of them is called "Pegasus" and will enter a new phase this Monday when a new committee of the Senate, the upper house of parliament, will convene for its first regular session to shed more light on Poland's latest wiretapping affair. It is about the spy software that the government - apparently using to deceive the public - acquired and that is named after the mythical creature Pegasus. The "Special Committee to Investigate Cases of Illegal Surveillance and Its Influence on the Electoral Process" decided on Wednesday is primarily intended to examine the alleged spying and covert combat against the politician Krzysztof Brejza. Brejza led the election campaign of the main opposition party ahead of the 2019 parliamentary elections,the liberal Civic Platform (PO). The PO clearly lost the election.
Gerhard Gnauck
Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.
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The head of the new committee is PO Senator Marcin Bosacki from Poznań, a journalist by training and later ambassador.
Bosacki said in the Senate that his group was "greatly concerned about the state of our democracy and the future of the Polish state.
A state in which the secret services influence the outcome of elections ceases to be a democracy.
It no longer belongs to the citizens.
It must be clarified whether that is what happened in Poland.” The opposition forces that dominate the Senate and a senator from the ruling national conservative PiS voted in favor of setting up the committee.
The PiS refrained from sending its own representatives.
PiS: A one-sided political spectacle
PiS senators pointed out that their chamber - unlike the House of Representatives - has no secret service committee and only limited control options.
Therefore, the committee should only approve a fixed thesis of the opposition and will offer "a one-sided political spectacle".
Be that as it may: On Monday, two employees of the Canadian research group The Citizen Lab, who claim to have been the first to identify the Pegasus abuse in Poland, will testify in the committee.
The head of the Polish Court of Accounts, Marian Banaś, will follow on Tuesday.
Although Banaś was brought into this position by the PiS, he is now fighting a small war with the government and takes his duties more seriously than the PiS would like.
In addition to Brejza, the people who are said to have been bugged since 2019 are the opposition lawyer Roman Giertych and the public prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek, who is one of the critics of the controversial judicial reforms in Poland. But the focus is on the politician. Between April and October 2019, i.e. during the election campaign and shortly after the election, his mobile phone was accessed 33 times. At the same time, PiS-affiliated TVP ran a campaign against Brejza. According to Brejza, the broadcaster used his SMS messages and even manipulated them to give the impression that Brejza had orchestrated a hate campaign against the ruling party.
PO boss Donald Tusk calls the wiretapping affair the "deepest crisis of democracy in Poland since 1989". Not only bugging the opposition, but also manipulating what was bugged and playing it back on television, "US President Nixon never thought of that," said Tusk, alluding to the Watergate affair. The latest status: In recent days, Brejza's wife Dorota, who also represents him as a lawyer, has complained that bomb threats had been sent from her own phone.
The Citizen Lab is based at the University of Toronto.
The group writes on its website that it has information on "dozens of cases" in different countries where opposition figures, journalists and others have been investigated with the help of Pegasus.
The Israeli software Pegasus, which has meanwhile been criticized worldwide, makes it possible to read contacts, conversations and text messages on mobile phones unnoticed and even to switch on the camera and microphone remotely.
Among the companies supplying such software, "Pegasus stands out in terms of ruthless misuse of its spy software by government customers," the Canadians write.
Kaczyński defends use of Pegasus
After specific suspected cases became known in Poland, government politicians, including Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, have tried to deny or cover up the purchase of Pegasus in recent weeks. Until the head of the ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński, impetuously spoke up and thwarted the plans of the cover-ups. "It would be bad if the Polish secret services did not have instruments of this type (like Pegasus)," said Kaczyński. "Criminal groups" would be monitored in this way "all over the world".
The authorities became aware of the senator in the context of investigations in his hometown of Inowrocław, where his father is the mayor.
However, the fact that "Pegasus was used for political purposes here is complete nonsense".
Kaczyński also dismissed another accusation from the opposition as a "technical" side issue: According to a document from the Court of Auditors, Pegasus was bought in 2017 for around 5.4 million euros, which, however, was paid from a coffers under the Ministry of Justice.
Should Parliament and the public be misled here?
Kaczyński defended the procurement as an "important public objective".
The Rzeczpospolita newspaper warned that "basic civil rights and freedoms are at stake" in the affair.