I have the impression that people are still not aware of the democratic enormity of the Spanish state's recognition this Thursday, through the director of the CNI intelligence agency, in the Congress of Deputies' official secrets committee, that it had investigated the Catalan independence movement with Pegasus spyware and that the espionage services had done this with judicial authorization from the Supreme Court. The fact that the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, is among the espionage victims recognized by the CNI makes the situation even more dramatic and grave. And its importance is further increased by the fact that people close to president Carles Puigdemont and representatives of the pro-independence civil groups are also included. The director of the CNI has only acknowledged 18 of the 65 cases of espionage with Pegasus that Citizen Lab considered confirmed on April 18th, which opens up several hypotheses: should we believe the official truth that we are now told? Could the CNI have carried out the rest of the spying without court authorization? Could the Spanish state, as on other occasions, have resorted to the so-called sewers in order to stay in the background?
None of these questions have an answer, although the simple official information given by the director of the CNI in Congress could gives rise to much conjecture and, more dangerously, places the Spanish espionage services in a very difficult position. A broad action involving the total violation of privacy of people in positions of responsibility is being opened in order to find out, in some cases, what they thought about things and what action they were going to take. Espionage for intelligence purposes: it was not a question of preventing a crime from being committed. Because Pegasus software is not standard spying but rather total intrusion that gets into every nook and cranny. No information is protected. In the case of president Aragonés, the usual representative of the Spanish state in Catalonia according to the Statute of Autonomy, it is difficult to find any explanation other than the wish to know all his political movements, nothing to do, obviously, with the suspicion of a crime. But if we pull on this thread, as we are required to do, we end up asking ourselves what information the CNI obtained from Aragonès and, above all, what use they made or intend to make of it.
The thing is, the CNI - born in Spain in 2002 after the self-immolation of the earlier intelligence agency, the Cesid, which, by a stange coincidence, also resulted from an espionage scandal that caused heads to roll, such as that of deputy PM Narcís Serra - figures as the body responsible for providing the Spanish prime minister and his government with information, analysis and proposals to help prevent and avoid any danger or aggression. Since we will never be able to officially know if the director of the CNI provided information to the minister of defence, Margarita Robles, who is the one who appoints her, and to the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, we must suspect that this happened. Under Spanish democracy there has been no prime minister who has resisted the immediate availability of the relevant information obtained by the CNI, some of which, depending on its importance, was also shared with the king in the regular dispatches between the minister of defence and the head of state.
The explanation by the director of the CNI, far from allowing a page to be turned on everything revealed so far - the espionage against Pedro Sánchez is another case entirely, with everyone suspecting Morocco, which has no reason to be pursuing the independence movement - raises so many questions and so many doubts, and sows so much fear that, although the commission of inquiry is essential, the revelation in parliament of the naked truth of a country that spies on political opponents is very concerning. A late and clumsy recognition, in which the secret data on the espionage recognized by the CNI do not in any way match the information revealed by Citizen Lab, the research laboratory at the University of Toronto.
They have tried to erect the penultimate firewall to avoid a blaze that has enormous dimensions and, moreover, with a drip-feed of information that, perhaps, has only just begun. Because when Citizen Lab in the coming weeks validates new names in sovereignist circles that have also been spied on with Pegasus after a rigorous analysis of new phones that will have been made after the first report was made public, what will be the response? Someone has put themselves in front of a huge snowball coming down the mountainside and has concluded that he or she will be able to stop it.