CatalanGate

CatalanGate is a 2022 political scandal involving accusations of espionage using the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, against figures of the Catalan independence movement. Targets of the supposed espionage included elected officials (including the four presidents of the Generalitat of Catalonia since 2010, two presidents of the Parliament of Catalonia, and MEPs), activists, lawyers, and computer scientists; in some cases, families of the main targets were also purportedly targeted.

The scandal was unleashed by the publication of an article in the New Yorker magazine, quoting studies by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, in which they examined the use of Pegasus spyware by different countries (Pegasus is only sold to governments who, according to Israel's own government, follow rule of law), and alleged to have found evidence of its deployment and use by Spain's National Intelligence Centre (CNI), to track phones owned by several Catalan politicians and other officials, and their entourage, including at times family members.

The Citizen Lab report was published on April 18, 2022. The report identified up to 65 alleged victims, consummated or attempted. The number of targets exceeded previous cases of espionage studied by Citizen Lab, far surpassing those of Al Jazeera (36 victims) and El Salvador (35 victims). Citizen Lab did not definitively attribute the responsibility for the attacks to a particular perpetrator, however, it went on to state that circumstantial evidence strongly suggests the perpetrator to be the Spanish Government. The term CatalanGate was used as title of the Citizen Lab report. Despite the scandal's dissemination as CatalanGate, it also allegedly affected two prominent Basque pro-independence figures.