Pegasus Eurochamber Commission sees legal protection in Spain against espionage as "obsolete" and points to opacity of the CNI

BRUSELAS, 8 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The European Parliament's Commission of Inquiry into the use of Pegasus and other spyware has pointed out this Tuesday "gaps" in the legal framework of Spain to authorize the monitoring of people, pointing out that legal protection is "obsolete", while it has pointed out that Spanish Intelligence works with little transparency.

This has been pointed out in the draft of the report of the commission of inquiry prepared by the Dutch liberal Sophie in't Veld, focused on the use of Pegasus in Poland, Spain, Hungary, Greece and Cyprus, among other Member States. The text will be subject to amendments before its final version in March is voted on by the commission itself and the plenary session of the European Parliament.

The preliminary report confirms the espionage of 65 Catalan independentistas that the 'Citizen Lab' center uncovered in a report in April, of which the majority 63 were infected with Pegasus and establishes that in the Spanish case there are gaps in the legal system in regarding the legal protection to carry out these activities.

In this way, he points out that despite the fact that the Spanish legal framework seems to give "significant consideration" to judicial permission to start monitoring a person, "in any case there seems to be a large gap regarding the retroactive nature of cyberespionage ".

"Even with the legal requirement that the duration of surveillance be specifically stipulated prior to authorization, it is not contemplated that once a device is infected with software, it is possible to retrospectively review previous communications and data in a way that was not possible with traditional surveillance measures," the report states.

The legal provisions for monitoring tasks in Spain correspond to a time when surveillance technology was less advanced and there were no programs like Pegasus, says the In't Veld report, which concludes that "legal guarantees run the risk to become obsolete and not provide citizens with sufficient protection".

Despite the fact that the report does not point out the authorship of the espionage in the case of the Catalan leaders, it focuses a large part of its conclusions on the role of the CNI, which it accuses of "having been involved in several scandals related to surveillance" and of acting with opacity.

In this sense, it emphasizes that the Spanish Constitution does not allow access to documents or information related to the Intelligence services and the espionage service is absent within the framework of the transparency law. "Much of the CNI's work is kept secret and lacks transparency," says the report.

It also focuses on the Official Secrets Law of 1968, lamenting that it originated during "the Franco era" and "its reform has long been the subject of debate in Spain." "The biggest problem with this largely outdated legislation is that it does not outline a time period beyond which the imposed secrecy will expire," the preliminary report says.