An investigative group called CatalanGate Investigation alleges that the Spanish government used the spyware program called Pegasus to spy on leaders of Catalan independence groups, including elected politicians, in 2022. Excerpt from www.elnacional.cat Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI) has now been identified as the perpetrator of massive and illegal espionage against the Catalan independence movement, through the use of Pegasus spyware. In 2022, the CatalanGate investigation revealed, in 2022, that at least sixty politicians and others linked to the Catalan independence movement had been spied on through their mobile phones, but now a new expert report, to which ElNacional.cat has had access, has clarified what everyone suspected: the CNI did it. The key was the mobile phone of current Catalan president Pere Aragonès, which the Spanish government admitted to having infected and spied on, through the CNI, from 2019 to March 2020 with judicial authorization. However, an expert report presented to the court months ago assesses the timing of the espionage as earlier, in the summer of 2018, as the ERC politician’s lawyer, Andreu Van den Eynde, has insisted. Now, this new report concludes – after analyzing several mobile phones with the same espionage pattern as that of Aragonès – that a single IT infrastructure was used to attack all the victims of the CatalanGate case, and therefore the perpetrator responsible for all of them is the same: the Spanish government. In this new expert report, commissioned by those affected and included in the Aragonès case, it is detailed that the company NSO, owner of Pegasus, creates a spyware program tailored to each client, most of which are government agencies. In the case of Spain’s CNI, it has been found that it used this spyware from 2015 until at least 2020. The original system used was to send an SMS with links to news stories so that people clicked on them and their mobiles became infected; then, the information extracted was directed to internet domains. In the case of the CNI, it was identified that it used five internet domains, not overlapping with each other in time.