‘CatalanGate’ spying scandal threatens to trigger political storm

Less than a year after he took office as Catalonia’s president with the promise of pursuing a policy of engagement with Madrid, Pere Aragonès is now threatening to cause a political earthquake due to spying allegations.

Revelations this week that dozens of leading pro-independence figures in the north-eastern region had been targets of surveillance have threatened to upset the fragile truce between the Catalan and Spanish administrations.

Aragonès was one of 65 individuals whose phones were hacked or targeted with spyware, according to The Citizen Lab, a technology research centre at the University of Toronto whose findings were published by The New Yorker magazine on Monday.

The Citizen Lab said that Pegasus spyware developed by Israeli firm NSO had been used for almost all the hacks or attempted hacks which it had traced and which took place between 2017 – when the government of Catalonia led a failed bid for secession – and 2020, except for one in 2015. The spyware is believed to be accessible only to governments.

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Among the victims was former Catalan president Quim Torra, when he was in office, as well as MEPS, legislators and civic activists. Aragonès, of the Catalan Republican Left party (ERC), was reportedly hacked when he was still vice-president of the region.

“A democratic state does not spy on its citizens, it does not spy on democratic movements, it does not eavesdrop on opponents of its government,” Aragonès said in a press conference. He demanded that the Spanish government open an immediate investigation and called for those responsible to face justice.

The revelations follow similar reports of use of Pegasus spyware in Hungary and Poland, prompting the European Parliament to launch an inquiry into those allegations on Tuesday. However, the use of the spyware appears to have been particularly widespread in surveillance of members of the Catalan separatist movement.

Those targeted would receive an SMS message on their phone, masquerading as an official notification from a government agency, a post office advisory or as a news story, containing a link which would trigger the installation of the spyware, allowing activity on the device to be monitored.

Elena Jiménez Botías, international representative for Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan civic association which supports independence, was one of those whose phone was hacked, apparently in 2020.

“If the experts say that only governments and states can acquire this spyware then the Spanish government should provide an explanation,” she told The Irish Times.

Legal appeal

She said she fears that those who carried out the surveillance will have had access to her communications while she was engaging with international NGOs and preparing a legal appeal for the president of Òmnium Cultural, Jordi Cuixart.

“Taken together, the targeting indicates an extremely well-informed and widespread effort to monitor Catalan political processes,” noted The Citizen Lab, which found that in some cases the surveillance, or attempted surveillance, took place beyond Spain’s borders, including in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland.

It concluded that circumstantial evidence suggests that “one or more entities within the Spanish government” are responsible for the surveillance.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government of Socialist Pedro Sánchez denied using the spyware and appeared to reject the veracity of the claims. “Here there is no spying, there are no intercepted calls or cases if it is not done under the umbrella of the law,” said government spokesperson Isabel Rodríguez.

Sánchez took office in mid-2018 and throughout his tenure he has pledged to lower tensions in Catalonia as a prelude to seeking a lasting solution to the region's fractious relationship with the rest of Spain.

The government relies on the parliamentary support of ERC, which has taken a more gradualist approach to independence under Aragonès. However, “CatalanGate” as The Citizen Lab has dubbed the spyware revelations, is likely to test the uneasy relationship between the Spanish and Catalan governments. Negotiations between representatives of the two administrations have repeatedly been delayed, partly due to Covid-19 but also to an apparent unwillingness by Sánchez to make serious concessions.

In his appearance before the media, Aragonès warned that this case could have “serious political consequences”, hinting at a possible withdrawal of his party’s parliamentary support, which in turn could trigger a collapse of the Sánchez government.

“Trust is minimal, because you cannot trust those who, everything suggests, have spied on you,” he added.

Hardline Catalan separatists have long seen Aragonès’s moderate approach to the sovereignty issue as naive in the face of a Spanish government which they believe will never agree to their ultimate goal of a binding referendum on independence. CatalanGate almost certainly pushes a solution to the territorial quandary even further away.