Former Polish spy chief arrested to testify before parliament in spyware probe

The former head of Poland’s internal security service was arrested Monday and hauled before parliament to testify about how powerful zero-click spyware was deployed by the country’s prior government against several hundred people.

News of the arrest of the former spy chief, Piotr Pogonowski, was first reported by the Financial Times.

The Polish government has been aggressively investigating the prior administration’s use of Pegasus spyware to surveil an estimated hundreds of opposition politicians and other targets in recent years.

Pogonowski disregarded three summons to testify to the Polish parliament about the abuses, according to the Financial Times.

Poland’s spyware problem emerged in 2021 when digital forensic researchers at the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International determined that Pegasus had been used to target three critics of the prior ruling party.

In April, Polish prosecutors announced they were building a case against current and former government officials suspected of targeting opposition party members and their allies with the spyware from 2017-2022.

Prosecutors said at the time that they had summoned 31 suspected Pegasus victims to disclose what happened to them and warned that the investigation could lead to arrests. Poland’s justice minister also revealed that nearly 600 people had been targeted with Pegasus.

In February, Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, revealed that he had found documents which “confirm 100%” that the prior administration illegally used Pegasus.

Polish Senate investigators had previously called the country’s 2019 elections unfair because of how Pegasus was used. The all-seeing spyware is manufactured by the NSO Group, headquartered in Israel.

Do you know anything about commercial spyware or the NSO Group which you consider to be newsworthy? Please be in touch if so. Message Suzanne Smalley on Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted, at Suzanne.236 or send an email to [email protected].