Poland’s Justice Minister Arrested For Illegal Use Of NSO Group Malware

After several months of pretending this sort of thing just didn’t happen there, the Polish government finally admitted some of its members had abused powerful smartphone malware it had purchased from Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group.

This came to light following an investigation that found someone in the government had illegally targeted a Polish government prosecutor who had been investigating election irregularities. He was notified by Apple, which had implemented a program to inform customers of suspected state-sponsored hacking.

As NSO Group’s future prospects continued to crumble, more investigations were opened. And now another abuser of NSO malware has been taken down by the same government that employed them. Here’s Suzanne Smalley, reporting for The Record:

Polish police on Friday arrested the country’s former justice minister, alleging that he signed off on the use of government money to pay for spyware used to snoop on opposition leaders and supervised cases where the technology was deployed.

The arrest of Zbigniew Ziobro — who was justice minister from 2015 to 2023 — follows the arrest earlier this week of the country’s former Internal Security Agency chief Piotr Pogonowski, according to local news reports.

Ziobro’s arrest is the latest high-profile action in a probe the country’s new prime minister has undertaken to mete out justice for nearly 600 people who are believed to have been victims of the spyware attacks. The abuses took place from 2017 to 2022.

Adding it all up, that’s one prosecutor victimized by illegal government spying and one participant in illegal government spying: the top prosecutor in the nation, roughly equivalent to the US DOJ’s Attorney General.

The more astounding facts come in the third paragraph: the country’s government illegally compromised phones nearly 600 times over a five-year period. Almost certainly, that total has increased since 2022. Any downward trend in recent months should be attributed to worldwide outrage against NSO Group, rather than the Polish government’s desire to see actual justice done.

My cynicism aside, it’s remarkable that anyone has been arrested for abusing a product this government has legally secured. If this had happened in lots of other countries, abusers of spyware would still be in positions of power, occasionally glancing at in-process investigations no one sincerely believes will be resolved before the news cycle draws attention away from the routine abusive acts of NSO Group’s customers.

And you know the system is completely corrupt when you take a look at this nexus:

The country’s 2019 elections were tainted by the use of Pegasus, Senate investigators said, recommending criminal charges.

The prosecutor targeted by Pegasus spyware by other government entities was correct: the 2019 elections had been interfered with. This government report confirms that, saying misuse of malware contributed to this election interference. Years later, there’s this: a report that says (without saying who was targeted) the head prosecutor in the nation illegally targeted someone or someones with NSO’s flagship product. It may be years before we find out who the minister targeted. But, given the information uncovered so far, it’s not that difficult to believe this was prosecutor-on-prosecutor surveillance.