WARSAW (Parliament Politics Magazine): Two additional Poles have been revealed as victims of phone hacking using Israel’s NSO Group’s infamously potent spyware: an agrarian political leader at odds with Poland government’s right-wing and the co-author of a book about Poland’s secret services head.
With a programme promoted for use primarily against terrorists and criminals, Citizen Lab cybersleuths have added to the list of persons purportedly targeted by state surveillance under Poland’s nationalist administration.
A Polish senator, a Polish lawyer, and a Polish prosecutor — all three critics of the ruling Law and Justice party of Poland — were all hacked with NSO’s Pegasus in late December, according to security researchers connected with the University of Toronto. They were the first evidence that a technology routinely employed by repressive governments throughout the world had been deployed in a European Union country.
The discovery sparked an investigation in the Senate, which is controlled by the opposition.
 A 33-year-old farmer and agrarian social movement leader, Michal Kolodziejczak was hacked many times in May 2019, according to Citizen Lab’s new findings. That was months before a fall election in which Kolodziejczak hoped to have AGROunia become a recognised political party. Support for his movement threatens to erode the ruling party’s major constituency, farmers and other rural voters in Poland. His attempts to organise a political party have been thwarted so far by the courts.
Tomasz Szwejgiert, the other target, claims to have worked with Polish secret services for years before coming into conflict with prominent authorities. He was hacked when he was co-authoring a book about Mariusz Kaminski, the chief of Poland’s secret services. From late March to June 2019, he was hacked 21 times using Pegasus, the incursions beginning after he and his associates addressed queries to the government of Poland concerning Kaminski.
In response to a request for comment, Stanislaw Zaryn, a spokesman for the Polish national security service, stressed that surveillance is only conducted in justifiable instances and in compliance with the law. He said he couldn’t say whether individual people were surveilled because of legal restrictions.
He said, however, that rumours of Szwejgiert’s “connections with the secret services” are false, and that the man has been charged with significant economic offences.
In one case, he was sentenced to 11 months in prison in 2018 on charges of being a member of a criminal gang that perpetrated a tax fraud scheme, costing the Polish government millions of zlotys. He also allegedly purported to be a member of the secret services for committing financial fraud.
The Associated Press was informed by Szwejgiert that he was innocent and believed he had been framed, claiming that he had worked for years with the secret services.
