Spies, damned spies

Spies, damned spies

Bethany Rielly writes about the terrible effect of the Spanish state’s surveillance against Catalan civil society. Is there a chance of justice? A branch of the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group in the Arava (Wadi Araba) desert south of the Dead Sea. The company’s Pegasus spyware is implicated in human rights abuses worldwide. AMIR COHEN/REUTERS

A smiling woman with blonde hair stares out from posters in flames. Her face burns into ashes as protesters drop paper onto a small fire outside the police station in the city of Girona. Girona is100 kilometres north of Barcelona, in the autonomous region of Catalonia. Riot police officers with guns watch. They don’t seem worried about the small protest.

It’s a very hot evening in July 2023, and hundreds of people are in a procession. The latest victims of Spain’s ‘policia infiltrat’ (police infiltration) scandal lead the procession. Just one week before, Girona’s progressive movements knew the woman in the burning poster as Maria Perelló, a student and activist. But that wasn’t her real name.

Maria was an undercover police officer with the Spanish National Police Corps. For three years, she infiltrated the city’s popular movements, making close friends, and entering a long romantic relationship with an important activist, Óscar Campos. She lived with him for over a year. The police spy’s mother even played a role in the operation.

‘I cannot find the words to describe the pain you have caused us’, Óscar Campos says, talking to the people in the procession. He is giving a message to the woman he thought was the love of his life. ‘But I can say I’m proud of loving you, and cried as much as I have. Because this is what makes us different... The city of Girona took care of you, loved you like its own child, but from today, it says you do not exist. You are not welcome.’

Some people in the crowds are crying, others make angry fists. The action by the police spy is an attack on the people by Maria, but also on the city itself. Placards and banners read: ‘Girona infiltrada’ – Girona was infiltrated.

This shocking case is part of a bigger surveillance scandal. In just over a year, journalists have exposed six undercover police officers in leftwing activist groups, including anti-eviction and anarchist movements, in Catalonia, Valencia, and Madrid. Four of those officers infiltrated groups linked with Catalonia’s pro-independence movement.

‘He seemed nice and open’

We found out about the policia infiltrat scandal in June 2022, when the Barcelona magazine La Directa exposed the first police spy, an agent using the cover name Marc Hernàndez Pon.

Like Maria, he enrolled as a student as part of his cover. At the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Education he joined the pro-independence Catalan Countries Students’ Union (SEPC). It is a large organization with branches where people speak Catalan, including Catalonia, the Balearic islands, and Valencia. The organization supports the rights of students.

‘He seemed like a nice person, very kind, very open,’ says SEPC spokesperson Júlia Portet. She knew Marc through her work with the student union. I am meeting her at Casal Popular Lina Òdena, a cultural centre in Barcelona’s busy Eixample district. It was here, in June 2020, that Marc first got involved with the city’s activists. When people started to trust him, the officer joined his campus branch of SEPC and later they chose him as coordinator. The union believes Marc wanted an important position to find out who was involved, and how the union worked.

When the group found they could not trust the fake activist, they talked to the team at La Directa. After a long investigation, they said that he was a police spy. When Julia Portet thinks about the time before she knew he was a police spy, she says, ‘There was a lot of fear and distrust. You think about what you said maybe one day and how much he knows.’

There was anger too. ‘We are students. We are not terrorists. We just fight for our rights and try to change things for the better.’ She explains how after the first feelings of fear, they became stronger as a group.

The spy in my phone

Just a few weeks before they found out about Marc, there was another big surveillance scandal in Catalonia. Citizen’s Lab is a research group at the University of Toronto investigating high-tech human rights abuses. In April 2022, Citizen’s Lab said that a powerful phone hacking tool called Pegasus targeted at least 65 people involved in the independence movement – including politicians, lawyers, activists and their families. The spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, gives the hacker complete control over the target’s mobile phone.

In theory, governments can only use the spyware to fight terrorism and serious crime, but as the Catalan case shows, it is abused a lot to target protesters. The Citizen’s Lab says the operation from 2015 to 2020 helped to target a large group of Catalan citizens under surveillance for many years. This makes it the biggest surveillance attack on record. Spain’s intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre (CNI), confirmed the ‘lawful’ targeting of 18 of the victims, but says the figure of 65 is too high.

I talked to many Pegasus victims including Joan Matamala, a businessman in his mid-60s. He runs a bookshop supporting the Catalan language and culture. Between 2019 and 2020, Pegasus was on his phone at least 16 times and another spyware tool called Candiru targeted his computer.

I meet Joan Matamala in his office in the science and technology campus of the University of Girona. He was here, in February 2021, when he received an unusual call from a researcher at Citizen’s Lab telling him that a powerful cyber-surveillance tool was running around inside his computer.

The researcher told Matamala to cover his computer in aluminium foil, a simple way of blocking the malware from communicating with servers. In this way the Citizen’s Lab team could send a copy to Microsoft. Microsoft then developed an update to stop future attacks.

‘It was one of the few happy moments at that time because it was a way to stop some of these very dangerous tools,’ Matamala tells me. He believes they targeted him because of his work developing digital voting tools with Fundació Nord, the company he helped to start in 2019. The tools, he says, stop the risk of governments interfering with elections.

Some of the most powerful spyware in the world targeted him but it’s a surprise how calm he is. Matamala is a pro-independence activist and he says being watched isn’t new. ‘We try to joke about it. Sometimes we meet and someone jokes, “Let’s say hello to them”.’ He points to his phone on the desk. ‘We try not to let it affect us.’

A protester with riot police as they tried to evict an occupied building in the Poble Sec neighbourhood of Barcelona. Undercover officers in the Spanish National Corps joined many activist groups in the city, including housing rights. One took part in at least four anti-eviction protests during his deployment. PAU DE LA CALLE/NURPHOTO/ALAMY

Total control

Like Matamala, many people with experience of Pegasus attacks already knew that they were under some sort of surveillance and they seemed OK with it. For them, it was one of a number of actions used by the Spanish government in recent years. This was especially after the 1st October independence referendum in 2017. The Spanish court said it was illegal. On the day of the vote, Spanish police raided polling stations and hundreds of civilians were injured. Half of the Catalan government went into exile and the other half was arrested.

In 2019, they convicted nine Catalan civil and political leaders of sedition for their role in the referendum and gave them sentences up to 13 years in prison. This caused mass protests and riots. They freed the nine prisoners in 2021 but some politicians are still in exile today.

The Pegasus attacks came at the same time as important dates in the trials of the nine leaders, as well as the negotiations after the referendum between the Catalan and Spanish governments.

Elisenda Paluzie led the pro-independence Catalan National Assembly organization between 2018 and 2022. She is an important economics professor at the University of Barcelona. She was targeted with Pegasus in 2019 and 2020. She believes they spied on the organizations so the hacker could have control over their movements, their ideas, their disagreements, their political plans, and their private lives.

‘I would prefer someone to punch me in the face’

State action into someone’s private life, digital or in the real world, has a serious effect. ‘It’s something you know exists, but you can never imagine it will happen to you,’ says Andreu Van den Eynde, a criminal barrister. He represented some of the imprisoned Catalan politicians and those in exile. His phone was targeted in 2020 during the pandemic, when he did most of his professional work on messaging apps.

‘When I first found out, I thought OK, these motherfuckers have all of my life,’ he tells me, as we sit in a cafe in the Sant Antoni neighbourhood of Barcelona. ‘Now we have all of our lives on our smartphones, professional, personal, ideas, health, finances… so it was really difficult. I always say that I would prefer someone to punch me in the face than to have my life hacked.’

Van den Eynde now speaks to his clients in code, and to tell them where to meet he writes addresses on pieces of paper and passes them through people he trusts. ‘We are seeing the same methods used during the Franco dictatorship and we are seeing them develop,’ he says.

Other Pegasus victims adapt to life as a victim because of the feeling of always being watched, he says. ‘We call this indefensión aprendida (“learned helplessness.”) I think this is what is happening to us.’

When people are under surveillance, it affects other individuals and organizations. It makes them feel afraid and silences them, too. Earlier in 2023, four UN rapporteurs warned that the scandal could lead to self-censorship. This has a terrible effect on the right to freedom of opinion and expression in Catalonia in general.

Pegasus targets include Catalan politicians and also other big civil society organizations. For example, six members of the Assembly, and four from Òmnium Cultural – both are important pro-independence NGOs. Their leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart were put in prison because they were involved in the referendum.

Elena Jiménez-Botías is the international advocacy officer at Òmnium Cultural. She tells me, ‘They want two things: one is to make a list of people in the movement, and the other is to stop us by making us feel afraid. I can understand that someone could say, “that is enough, I’m leaving”. But that’s not me or my colleagues.’

Omnium’s new president, Dolors Fileu, tells me that at the Assembly offices staff leave phones outside of meetings and check the building for bugs. ‘Now we feel that the Spanish state is always there, always behind our backs.’ But both Elena Jiménez-Botías and Dolors Fileu say the scandal has only a small effect on their organizations. ‘We continue with our work,’ Fileu says clearly. As Matamala says, ‘Si et fan por, ja t’han vençut’. If they scare you, they have already defeated you.

Tools of control

The activists targeted by undercover police are also staying strong. Sònia Olivella is a lawyer with the Barcelona rights group Iridia. She is part of the legal team representing eight women in a legal challenge against an undercover officer. He used the cover name Daniel Hernàndez Pons (Dani). He infiltrated anarchist groups in the Sant Andreu de Palomar neighbourhood of Barcelona. He tricked at least eight female activists into sexual relationships. One woman told La Directa she felt he raped her.

‘It’s so serious,’ says Sonia Olivella. ‘The state should protect you but it is harming you. There is a very big effect on the right to association, to join clubs, societies, political parties, and trade unions... The infiltration, it seems, is not only to get information, but also to make it difficult for society to organize and to express different political ideas.’

But Eva Pous, from the leftwing pro-independence group Alerta Solidaria, believes the spying operations have the opposite effect. The organization is giving legal support to people spied on. ‘When you understand that the infiltration isn’t targeted you, but your ideas, apolitical group, or a movement, it helps to make you stronger,’ she tells me.

So far, the Spanish government is saying very little about the scandal. Someone in Parliament asked about the case of Dani, the undercover officer Daniel Hernàndez Pons. Spain’s interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the operation was to stop crime and it was legal.

These two surveillance scandals in Catalonia tell us that democracies spy on their citizens because they have different political ideas from the state.

Like the people targeted with Pegasus, activists in Catalonia’s leftwing groups also believe the state infiltrated them to monitor the ordinary members in the independence movement, not just the leaders. The separatist movement includes very different people from the centre-right political party Junts to the leftist Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP). They all want the same thing - an independent Catalonia – but little more. The CUP, Alerta Solidaria, and SEPC are all members of the pro-independence Catalan Left. This is a group of organizations supporting an independent state of Catalonia.

After the Catalan Pegasus cases were exposed, the World Organization Against Torture said that the scandals are not isolated cases, but part of a set of tools against critical ideas, political protest, and the loss of civil society space’. Many have criticized Spain in recent years for introducing legal changes to restrict freedom of expression. The most important are the anti-protest law and reforms to counter-terror laws.

Jordi Cuixart was the president of NGO Òmnium Cultural. He gives a speech beforer the Catalan elections in 2015 (27S) The election was really a vote on independence. Cuixart was sentenced to nine years in prison four years later, because of his role in the 2017 independence referendum. While in prison, his phone was targeted with Pegasus spyware. Four members of Òmnium, a pro-independence organisation, were also spied on. MATTHIAS OESTERLE/ZUMA WIRE/ALAMY LIVE NEWS

What is stopping justice?

Pegasus victims want answers. But after more than a year, they have no idea why they were targeted. Many court cases on the issue are delayed. This is mainly because judges stopped the cases because there was not enough evidence and they rejected the reports by Citizen’s Lab. Victims must give their phones to the Spanish police for analysis. As Elisenda Paluzie, the economics professor at the University of Barcelona, says, ‘People spied on us and the same people are going to test our mobiles?’

Action by the European Union is disappointing. A European Parliament committee to investigate spyware abuse in EU states called on the Spanish government to investigate the cases. But no-one in Spain is listening. Jiménez-Botías says, ‘Now there are recommendations, but no action.’

Not many people think the cases will have a positive result and they are more hopeful about justice through the European Courts of Human Rights. Campaigners say we need a global ban on the sale of spyware. ‘Because of the way Pegasus works, there’s no way that you can use these tools, even for terrorism and serious crime, that agrees with human rights,’ Castillo says. ‘We cannot live in a world where those types of spyware exist.’

Activists affected by the police infiltration cases are also finding it very difficult. In September 2023, the public prosecution office told the courts to throw out the case of the eight women, saying the sexual relationships were consensual. The women are accusing the undercover policeman, his manager, and the Interior Ministry, of sexual abuse, treatment to make them feel of no value, sharing private information, and action against their civil rights.

An international human rights issue

The activists in Catalonia may be at the beginning of their action for justice, but they are not alone. Another group of campaigners in the UK has been here before.

In 2010, activists and journalists in the UK exposed the undercover policing of political groups from 1968 to 2008. Police spies infiltrated more than 1,000 mainly leftwing organisations. They used abusive action, including tricking women into sexual relationships and with some even having children with them when undercover. These anti-democratic operations affected social movements and caused terrible harm to very many lives. For 13 years, those spied on have worked to show the secrecy around the undercover policing and won important battles against the police. In 2021, a tribunal in the UK said that the undercover operations against environmental activist Kate Wilson for many years were against her human rights, including the right to freedom of expression and assembly.

The legal team in Barcelona are using this case as a way to help their own campaign for the truth. Sònia Olivella, the lawyer with the Barcelona rights group Iridia, says that the clear similarities between the cases ‘showed us that this is an international human rights problem’. In the UK, ‘Lindsey’ is a member of Police Spies Out of Lives, the support group for women tricked into relationships by undercover officers. She hopes the campaigners’ experience for the last 13 years may help to speed things up in Spain.

But, if the courts don’t give any answers, campaigners say they will take other action. As Eva Pous from Alerta Solidaria says, ‘It’s about getting people out on the streets in big numbers to show the state that if it won’t hold itself accountable, society will do it for them.’

NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2023/10/23/catalonia-surveillance-spies

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)