08 Jan 2022; MEMO: Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland's ruling Conservative party Law and Justice, has admitted that his country bought Israel's notorious NSO Group's spyware, Associated Press (AP) reported on Friday.
Kaczynski, who claimed that the Israeli spying product is better than other spyware software, denied that it was used to affect election results or is being used to target political opponents.
By hacking phones, the Israeli spyware Pegasus allows authorities to monitor communications and real-time conversations if they are not encrypted.
"It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool," Kaczynski shared in an interview to be published in the Monday edition of weekly magazine Sieci.
This came following exclusive reports by AP that Citizen Lab, a cyber watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that three Polish government critics were hacked using NSO's Pegasus software.
According to AP, the hacking revelations have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970s Watergate scandal in the US, and have prompted calls for an investigative commission in parliament.
Kaczynski asserted that he saw no reason to set up such a commission and denied that the surveillance played any role in the outcome of the 2019 election.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the Citizen Lab-AP findings "fake news" and suggested a foreign intelligence service could have done the spying.
However, AP reported that the idea of foreign party espionage was dismissed by critics who said no other government would have any interest in the three Polish targets.
AP disclosed that Deputy Defence Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz stated last month: "It is not used to track or surveil anyone in our country."
