The director of the CNI confirms that the Supreme Court authorized spying on the former presidents of the ANC Jordi Sànchez and Elisenda Paluzie
He acknowledges the spying since 2019, even though the Mossos had already detected intrusions into Sánchez's mobile phone since 2015.
The director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Esperanza Casteleiro, confirmed this Monday in a Barcelona court that the Supreme Court authorized Spain's intelligence services to spy on former ANC presidents Jordi Sánchez and Elisenda Paluzie. The Council of Ministers declassified some of the classified documents related to this spying last week, allowing Casteleiro, who has headed the CNI since 2022, to confirm before Barcelona's Court of Instruction Number 23 that Sánchez and Paluzie were spied on from 2019. However, the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) detected intrusions on Sánchez's mobile phone as early as 2015, when theoretically there was still no authorization to spy on him. Casteleiro acted as she did a few months ago in the case of the spying on ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia) members of parliament Josep Maria Jové and Diana Riba. In other words, it has limited itself to confirming only what the declassified portion of the Supreme Court's rulings reveals—that since 2019 the spying on Sánchez and Paluzie had been judicially authorized—but without confirming the details or the methods of espionage. In an appearance before Congress in May 2022, the former director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Paz Esteban, had already admitted to having spied, with the Supreme Court's approval, on both Sánchez and Paluzie.
Intrusions from four years prior
In May 2022, the ANC filed a lawsuit regarding the spying on its leaders, although it did not target any specific state official or agency. At that time, and with the Citizen Lab report, it was established that those affected were Paluzie, with four attacks and one confirmed infection between 2019 and 2020; Sánchez, with 26 attacks between 2015 and 2017 and four confirmed infections; the national secretaries Sònia Urpí, with two SMS attacks in June 2020 and one confirmed infection, and Arià Bayé, with one SMS in 2020; and the grassroots member of the organization, Jordi Domingo, a victim via WhatsApp in 2019. Furthermore, a report by the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) confirms that Sà was also targeted. The first attack occurred in September 2015, when he had just been elected president of the ANC but an independence referendum had not yet been agreed upon. Most of the attacks occurred between then and October 2017, when he was imprisoned along with the president of Òmnium, Jordi Cuixart. In fact, the police assert that Sánchez's mobile phone was the victim of a malicious Pegasus attack and suffered data extraction between September and October 13, 2017, right at the height of the October 1 referendum and before he entered prison. All of these infections would fall outside the period for which there was judicial authorization, which Casteleiro confirmed today.
Authorized attacks
The last attack on Sánchez was between June and July 2020, when he was on prison leave. This attack, therefore, was carried out under the protection of the Supreme Court's authorization. In the case of Paluzie, whose two phones have been analyzed, she received two SMS attacks in August 2019. Two mobile phones belonging to Paluzie have been analyzed. On the first, she received two SMS attacks in August 2019, shortly before the Supreme Court's verdict in the trial against the Catalan independence leaders, and a second one at the end of October of that year, just after the verdict and the protests against it. The second SMS was of a certain type. zero-clickIn this type of attack, the user doesn't even need to click on the received link to be infected.
Paluzie then changed her mobile phone. And in May and June of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and during the elections for the secretariat of the organization she presided over, she received two SMS links to supposed news articles from two different media outlets discussing the ANC and its elections. Urpí was attacked, like Paluzie, in June 2020, around the time of the elections for the national secretariat of the organization, when she was elected to the governing body but without yet holding any specific position.