The Israeli army's cyberwarfare unit uses Microsoft servers to store a wealth of surveillance data on Palestinians captured from the mobile phones of Palestinians, data it has used to planning deadly military attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. Microsoft has made available to the Israeli army a customized area with almost unlimited capacity within its Azure cloud, allowing the Israeli army's cyberespionage unit, Unit 8200, to build a powerful new tool for mass surveillance: a vast and intrusive system of mobile phones made daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is revealed in a joint investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew outlet Local Call.

In July 2021, a consortium of 17 media outlets published a list of over 50,000 phone numbers in over 45 countries that had been potentially flagged for Pegasus surveillance by, they noted, authoritarian regimes. The Guardian was one of these media, and this Wednesday it has published that, in the case of Spain, the selected mobiles were over 200, by a client, it adds, which could be Morocco.

The Spanish government has been left alone over the Pegasus case. This Tuesday opposition parties joined forces to demand Spanish president Pedro Sánchez's appearance in Parliament. They consider the explanations given so far are insufficient and demand the leader of the executive face parliamentary scrutiny over spying on pro-independence leaders, but also on Sánchez himself and the Minister of Defence, Margarita Robles. Pro-independence groups, together with the PP, Ciudadanos and Vox, have voted in favour of this appearance at the meeting of Board of Party Spokespersons. Only the Socialists and Unidas Podemos opposed it, since they consider that before the Spanish president appears in the Spanish parliament "previous steps" should be taken first.

No political or social leader of the Catalan or Basque independence movements nor of Podemos can be surprised to find out they were spied on. Yet The New Yorker presenting evidence that sophisticated Israeli computerised espionage material that only states can access has been installed on more than 60 mobiles phones takes it to another level. It is not the same to suspect that your conversations are being listened to as to have hard evidence, with the government ending up admitting the National Intelligence Centre (CNI) is probably behind a clearly illegal espionage.

Ronan Farrow (New York, 1987) does not know what a modest and conventional life is. He is the son of cinema stars Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, was a child prodigy and, as a journalist, has become a global icon since he uncovered in the pages of The New Yorker cases of abuse by former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's, which made headlines around the world in the wake of the Me Too movement and earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

The Catalan pro-independence movement has announced a new international legal offensive of in the wake of the cybersurveillance of several politicians, activists and journalists revealed this week. From the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, former president Carles Puigdemont and former vice president Oriol Junqueras, have announced that they will file complaints in five European countries, specifically in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany and France; the countries where Pegasus spyware was used against pro-independence supporters and their allies, according to Citizen Lab's investigation.

Since the first scandal related to the cybersurveillance by some European governments and authorities on their own citizens was uncovered, the European Commission has been alarmed and concerned, but in practice has done very little. From Brussels, the EU executive considers it "unacceptable", but assures that it has no competence to do anything more than to call on governments to investigate the various cases that have come to light. This comes after The New Yorker, following an investigation by Citizen Lab, revealed several European governments including Spain's and Greece's appeared to be involved with mass cyber surveillance. Mass spying on Catalan politicians, activists and journalists has taken centre stage.