The lawsuit is directed against the manufacturers of these software programs, as well as against the CNI and the Guardia Civil. Two of the plaintiffs, Joan Arús and Jordi Baylina, testified today, while the remaining three, Pau Escrich, Joan Matamala, and Xavier Vives, are scheduled to testify on Monday.
The Citizen Lab laboratory, affiliated with the University of Toronto, documented the espionage cases between 2019 and 2021. However, the plaintiffs have expressed concern about how the prosecution and state legal services, representing the interests of former CNI director Paz Esteban, are downplaying the investigation and the evidence presented.
The questions during the interrogation were not aimed at obtaining more information about these espionage cases to determine responsibilities, but rather to question the data that has been on the table for years and has motivated the lawsuit.
During the interrogation, the infection dates of the devices and the possible involvement of the Guardia Civil were constantly questioned. As a new development in the case, the five individuals who were spied on will hand over their mobile devices and hard drives to the Mossos d'Esquadra for a forensic report to corroborate or expand upon the infection dates and methods already revealed by Citizen Lab.
This marks the first time that espionage with Candiru, in addition to Pegasus, is being investigated, and also the first time that a former director-general of the Guardia Civil, María Gámez (who held the position from 2020 to 2023), is under investigation in this context. Her predecessor, Félix Vicente Azcón, was initially included but was later excluded by the judge due to his status as an aforado magistrate of the Supreme Court.
Jordi Baylina, a resident of Switzerland, will provide two mobile devices that were infected with Pegasus. According to Citizen Lab, Baylina was one of the individuals who experienced the most attacks. Documentation from the judicial case against Tsunami Democràtic, opened by Spanish National Court judge Manuel García Castellón, reveals the Guardia Civil's interest in installing spy software on Baylina's phone, as they considered him responsible for the IT design of Tsunami Democràtic.
The plaintiffs, who are part of the Sentinel Alliance organization, are entrepreneurs and developers of open-source protocols for decentralized governance, anonymous digital voting, and sovereign digital identity. Citizen Lab documented over seventy attacks against them and their associates, including family members and advisors such as Elies Campo, a former executive at Telegram and Whatsapp.
