Polish opposition duo hacked with NSO spyware

One can simply look at her twitter profile. She is a clear member of "the other side", the PO/KO pro-EU/LGBT/lewica crowd. So people from that crowd treat anything against her as an offensive on them. And people from the nationaliste camp treat her as a kind of traitor. So the usual us and them thing as everywhere.

It's worth mentioning is that "us vs them" here is that one side which wants to bring back the rule of law and polish constitution (Wrzosek) and the other wants to keep ignoring it (polish government).

Most people wouldn't call that "us vs them" though.

Some statements in this article are a bit incorrect:

1) Giertych did not present any evidence that the current government infected his phone with Pegasus, he only says that in the media, always citing other media to avoid getting sued. He did publish what he claims is a report he received from Citizen Lab, here’s the pdf (in English): https://tvn24.pl/najnowsze/ix6ek8-Roman-Giertych_Targeting-M... The report claims his current phone contains evidence that his previous phone was infected. He did not send the old phone for inspection.

2) Wrzosek didn’t publish any evidence that her phone was infected – she just retwitted someone else’s twitt.

3) Both Wrzosek and Giertych are under investigation – Wrzosek has disciplinary charges for overstepping her competencies and failure to perform her duties as a prosecutor. I don’t know the details, but it’s about the 2020 presidential vote-by-mail elections. Giertych has criminal charges for money fraud, he was arrested in 2020, but a servile judge released him and others arrested with him, since then Giertych has been ignoring the Prosecutors Office, and is now being arrested for that.

4) The AP article claims Żaryn was vague – his name is Stanisław Żaryn, not ‘Stanislaw Zaryn’, he’s the spokesman for the minister-coordinator of special services (not ‘A Polish state security spokesman’ – ABW is controlled by the prime minister), and he wasn’t vague, he stated that surveillance is carried out by police, not by any special services, and in controlled manner – it requires written request by a court and permission from the public prosecutor general (police act, article 19), it’s not something that can be done on a whim, he denied that special services are used for political fighting, and wrote that due to legal restrictions he cannot say whether specific methods and forms of operational control are used in Poland. The statement is here: https://twitter.com/StZaryn/status/1473210690676695043

5) Giertych isn’t known for being a lawyer, but for being a politician – in 1989 he recreated the Młodzież Wszechpolska (All-Polish Youth, the pre-war MW was the largest university student organization, during the war it merged with ONR and ceased to exist after the Warsaw Uprising. Giertych’s MW has around 1000 members), and was one of the leaders of Liga Polskich Rodzin, a right-wing political party that had some MPs in early 2000s, and was in coalition with PIS during the first PIS government, Giertych was then the vice prime minister and the minister of education. That government ended being a minority government, and when it was certain it cannot be saved, LPR left the coalition. After the 2007 elections LPR didn’t get a single MP, so Giertych quit the party, returned to being a lawyer and started representing people associated with the Platforma Obywatelska party (including Tusk and his son). It’s funny that the same people who back then were calling him a Nazi (and not without a reason) are now working with him and claiming he is a saint.

6) Both Giertych and Wrzosek are working for political party that used special services against journalists – in 2009 sent ABW after Cezary Gmyz from Rzeczpospolita and Bogdan Rymanowski from TVN, and in 2014 sent ABW to break into the headquarters of Wprost. Waldemar Pawlak, who was the minister-coordinator of special services in the PO-PSL government told a journalist that everyone is being spied on and that journalists should get used to it.

7) PIS didn’t win the 2019 elections by a slim margin – the election was won by United Right, an alliance of which PIS is a member, and United Right received 43,6% of the votes, while the Civic Coalition (technically PO and Nowoczesna, but in reality it’s just PO) received only 27,4%.

8) Sikorski wasn’t recorded on purpose – it happened in 2014, the staff of a restaurant called ‘Sowa i Przyjaciele’, where prominent PO politicians were meeting, placed a small recording device under the table, and Sikorski was one of the politicians that got recorded. The staff eventually sold the recordings to Wprost, Wprost published it (this is what got them raided), and, well, it started a huge scandal that eventually led to the fall of the PO-PSL government, and completely devastated both parties. If anyone is interested, the Wikipedia has a good article on the scandal (in Polish): https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afera_pods%C5%82uchowa_w_Polsc...

9) The prosecutor applied for Giertych’s arrest because Giertych has ignored over 20 summons for questioning. He’s a suspect in Polnord case – Polnord is a large development company that has been bought by a Cyprian fund called Hanapeta, which was involved in the Cum-Ex scandal, and it’s CEO has been arrested in France in 2020. Giertych’s law firm worked for Polnord and received some suspicious money transfers.

10) The name of the city where Wrzosek was sent is Śrem, not Srem, and I don’t believe she never heard about it – it’s one of the oldest cities in Poland, it’s fairly well known, and was a royal city in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Also moving judges and prosecutors can be done only with their permission.

The crisis is also recent. The Covid-19 pandemic arrived in Europe in early 2020. Please see the other comment that I just wrote in this thread. Poland has 2 paths out of the crisis, it can take on debt or it can take on inflation (or it can mix the two). But there is no free way out of the crisis. Whatever strategy it decides on will have some consequence that will take a few years to unwind. And that is mostly true of all nations, of course, though Poland's situation is somewhat unique, in that it is in the EU but has its own currency, which has tended to make devaluation an easy option for it.

One can imagine an alternate universe in which Poland has been lead by progressives for the last 30 years, who make big investments in science research and education so that Poland came up to speed quickly on high-technology industries and so rapidly increased labor productivity. In that alternate universe, the government of Poland would be able to follow a policy of tight money, such that zloty would gain value against the euro. And of course, some of that happened, labor productivity increased. The zloty was 6 to 1 against the USA dollar in 1989 and then got to 2.5 to 1 around 2011 or 2012, before sinking again. One can imagine, in this alternate universe, Poland made such huge investments in science research and education that the zloty eventually got to be 1 to 1 with the USA dollar.

But that isn't what happened. Poland has been governed by center-right and far-right parties who've limited government involvement in the economy and who have avoided big bets on future investment, outside of infrastructure investments. So, as a practical matter, devaluing the currency, and accepting inflation, has been the most convenient way for the Polish government to keep unemployment down.

Unless a prosecutor mandated it. Mandated by some politician, because there are no independent prosecutors in Europe, but in Italy.