The Polish Prosecutor's Office illegally wiretapped a number of officials and politicians using special Hermes software. This is reported by the newspaper Wyborcza, citing sources, UNN reports.
Details
Earlier it was reported that Polish intelligence services used Pegasus spyware to wiretap former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, current Prime Minister Donald Tusk, other politicians, as well as businessmen, lawyers and public figures.
However, according to the newspaper, in 2021, the Polish prosecutor's office, headed by Bogdan Swieczkowski, bought Hermes spyware worth $3.5 million. Experts call this software more advanced than Pegasus. They also say that it cannot be detected by simple tools because it is installed at the lowest system level.
According to the newspaper, the prosecutor's office hired two former employees of the Polish Internal Security Agency to serve Hermes. "One of them received about $250 per hour of work," the article says.
According to Wyborcza, the software was used to illegally surveil politicians, government officials, judges and prosecutors who were suspected of disloyalty to the Law and Justice party leadership.
At the same time, the current leadership of the Polish Prosecutor's Office learned about the Hermes program by accident when last week the Prosecutor's Office received a bill for a periodic subscription to the Hermes system.
In a commentary to the publication, Svenchovsky, who is currently a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal, denied that the prosecutor's office had purchased the spyware. It is noted that in the near future a decision will be made to conduct a prosecutor's investigation into these facts, which should find out what the real capabilities of this software were and for what purposes it served the previous government.