In November, the documentary Surveilled produced by journalist Ronan Farrow (son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, winner of a Pulitzer for uncovering the Harvey Weinstein case and one of the hundred most influential personalities of 2018 according to Time) premiered on HBO Max. The documentary is having a lot of repercussions around the world, but curiously in Spain it is being totally ignored by most of the media, although the Spanish state is a prominent protagonist in it.
Surveilled: exposing spyware used in Catalonia
In the documentary Surveilled, Ronan Farrow delves into the dark world of the spyware industry, such as Pegasus, using the Catalangate case as a common thread.
The Catalangate scandal was already uncovered by him in 2022 in the New Yorker report “How democracies spy on their citizens”.
It documented the discovery by the Canadian Citizen Lab of the most important case of cell phone spying so far: At least 65 people (politicians, activists and lawyers of the movement for the independence of Catalonia) had been illegally spied on, allegedly by the Spanish state in its fight against the peaceful independence movement, whose only “crime” is to raise a political proposal unacceptable to the ultra-nationalism that forms the basis of the Spanish identity.
This type of spyware, such as Pegasus, managed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is sold only to states to supposedly prevent terrorists, organized mafias and dangerous criminals from committing assassinations. There is an unspoken consensus that, in such cases, it is appropriate to violate the right to privacy and intimacy to prevent greater evils
But the thesis of the documentary is that this technology can be used beyond these exceptional cases.
Spain is implicated
Dictatorial regimes, which already violate all kinds of rights, can use it outside the aforementioned cases, as the Saudi regime did with Pegasus to track and assassinate journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And the documentary argues that Western democracies can also be tempted to use these almost invisible technologies for spurious purposes against political rivals.
Thus the example of the Spanish state serves to illustrate how it is crossing all red lines to try to destroy a political movement that questions its membership in the state, even if the independence movement acts democratically through civil demonstrations and negotiations and poses a political outcome through a referendum.
But, since 2010, Spain has carried out all kinds of legal and illegal actions to try to destroy this civil movement: it has sent 10,000 police to violently prevent a referendum, has created parapolice groups to bribe and fabricate evidence against the movement, has infiltrated spies to civil organizations, has used justice to repress and has illegally spied through cell phones to all the people who stood out.
Despite the repercussion that the documentary is having around the world, especially in the USA, it has been deliberately ignored by the Spanish press that tries to hide all this illegitimate activity or, at most, when something comes to light, they try to pass it off as “normal” actions that a democratic state should take.
Surveilled is the tip of the iceberg
As the Minister of Defense Margarita Robles stated in Parliament: “How can we not spy on them and fight them with all the means at our disposal, if they are a movement that threatens the survival of our state?”
This has been the case throughout the history of the Spanish State: “Anything goes for the unity of Spain”. But now, in a supposedly democratic framework, it is still in force and Spanish ultranationalism has no compunction in applying to the movement for the independence of Catalonia putting in suspense “selectively” the guarantees that differentiate democratic systems from dictatorial ones.
Featured image via screengrab
