Poland's Pegasus scandal: spying it couldn't control
Surveillance control · 13.10.2026

Warsaw is trying to figure out who actually held the controls of its own spy program. Prosecutors have established that the Central Anticorruption Bureau bought Pegasus back in 2017 but "did not have full control over the system." The bureau lacked passwords to some administrative accounts, the server module for infecting phones remained under the "exclusive control" of NSO Group, and the data leaked through servers outside Poland that the bureau didn't control. In other words, the state bought a surveillance tool to spy on its own citizens — and handed the keys to the manufacturer. An operation called "surveillance under someone else's control" is pure digital irony.

Prime Minister Tusk called it "a crime against the state" and claimed NSO cooperated with Israeli intelligence — though investigators themselves only confirmed technical access, not whether anyone actually looked into other people's phones. Meanwhile, a parliamentary commission has prepared 11 criminal cases and uncovered a curious detail: the judges who authorized the surveillance had no idea Pegasus could extract absolutely everything from a phone. The approvals were given blind.

As a reminder, the system was purchased with money from a crime victims' support fund — and used to monitor hundreds of people, including opposition politicians. Tusk himself said that his wife and daughter were also under surveillance.

Yet the scandal isn't stopping business as usual: in July, Poland signed a $110 million contract for Israeli Elta radars to monitor the Baltic. Politics is one thing, procurement is another — while some officials try to figure out who leaked citizens' data, others are signing new contracts with the very same surveillance-tech market. The absurdity comes full circle: complaining about losing control over your own intelligence operations while buying new surveillance tools from the same market neighbors.

Source: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-911543