Five months after the Pegasus Project, in December 2021, the Associated Press together with Citizen Lab reported that three Polish government critics were victims of surveillance conducted using Pegasus. In reactions to the revelations, which were dubbed “Polish Watergate,” members of the European Parliament called on the European Commission to investigate hacking allegations in Poland. Polish opposition leader Donald Tusk said the scandal was “unprecedented in [Poland’s] history” and that it was “the biggest, deepest crisis for democracy since 1989.”
In early January 2022, Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that NSO Group sold its spyware to Poland’s anti-corruption body and to Hungary after leaders of the two countries met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017. A few days later, chairman of Poland’s ruling party Jarosław Kaczyński acknowledged the Polish government bought Pegasus but denied it used it against political opponents.
Later in January 2022, a Polish Senate commission opened a probe into the use of Pegasus against government critics. Senators who participated in the commission planned to draft a law regulating the use of surveillance technology in Poland.
In February 2022, Amnesty International’s Security Lab found that the phones of two people close to a key Polish opposition figure (himself hacked with Pegasus) were targeted with NSO Group’s spyware. Gazeta Wyborcza and other members of the Pegasus Project consortium coordinated by Forbidden Stories reported that their numbers were selected for potential targeting, along with more than 100 others in Poland.
The same month, Polish and international media reported that Poland’s Supreme Audit Office (NIK) claimed to have been subjected to over 6,000 attempted attacks with Pegasus on more than 500 devices in 2020 and 2021, including over 100 smartphones. A few days later, this authority said it suspected the hacking of three phones with Pegasus, according to Gazeta Wyborcza.
In July 2022, Gazeta Wyborcza revealed that the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau of Poland targeted with Pegasus the phones of three individuals involved in the privatization of the chemical company CIECh.
The news outlet also reported that left-wing senator Grzegorz Napieralski and Polish opposition-linked mayor Jacek Karnowski had their phones targeted with Pegasus.