Former Polish governments used Israeli software to spy on opposition, says PM
The previous Polish government used Israeli spyware to target opposition politicians and members of the judicial system, the country's prime minister said on Monday in a televised address.
Donald Tusk said a two-year parliamentary investigation had found that the previous nationalist-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) governing party allowed Israel access to data collected using Pegasus spyware.
The PiS governments paid $7.65m for the system and used it to surveil opposition politicians as well as members of the legal system who were critical of the ruling administration.
According to media reports, Pegasus was acquired in late 2017, actively used from 2017 to 2023, deployed during the 2019 elections, and ultimately used against hundreds of individuals, including several prominent figures from within its own ranks.
Tusk said the data collected by the software was accessible to NSO Group, the Israeli company behind Pegasus, and was not fully under the Polish government's control.
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"Imagine that the people responsible for justice and national security [in Poland] handed over thousands, tens of thousands, of sensitive details about Polish citizens to a foreign country, Israel, without having any control over it," he said.
Tusk said the Internal Security Agency, foreign intelligence services, the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau and the justice ministry had all been implicated in the controversy.
NSO's troubled record
After taking office in 2023, Tusk’s coalition opened investigations into claims that the previous Law and Justice government had bought Pegasus with public money and used it to monitor political rivals and journalists.
Former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro and other senior officials from the former administration deny any wrongdoing, insisting the spyware was essential for national security and deployed only with judicial authorisation.
But the head of a parliamentary inquiry said on Monday that the judges who approved its use did not fully grasp the extent of Pegasus’s surveillance capabilities.
The spyware is able to infiltrate the devices of WhatsApp users and harvest their messages, photos, calls and other data. Its parent company, NSO Group, has been under US ownership since last year.
In 2025, the firm lost a US federal court case against Meta over its targeting of Whatsapp users, and was ordered to pay the tech giant $167m. That was later reduced to just $4m, however NSO Group was permanently barred from targeting Whatsapp and its users.
NSO Group has also been placed on a blacklist that stops it from doing business with US companies unless it gets specific approval, after former President Joe Biden's administration deemed it to have been acting against US foreign policy and national security interests.
Reports suggest that NSO Group has been seeking removal from the blacklist under current President Donald Trump.
Last year, NSO Group appointed David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel under Trump's first term from 2017 to 2021, as its executive chair.
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