Almost three years after Ronan Farrow published the report called CatalanGate, according to which 65 Catalan pro-independence activists had been spied on with the Pegasus program, the journalist from The New Yorker has just released a documentary with too many holes and self-serving political manipulations. He has titled it Surveilled and uses pro-independence activist Elies Campo to support the thesis that the Spanish government is responsible for this alleged spying.
Farrow assures during the documentary that “the Spanish government did not respond to our requests for an interview” without specifying which representatives of the executive he wanted to interview. He hides, however, that three members of the Spanish government were spied on with Pegasus. The phones of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, the Minister of Defence, Margarita Robles, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, were infected with this spyware. There is no mention in the documentary of the infection of the phones of the members of the Spanish government because that this would spoil the thesis defended by Farrow and Campo that it was the intelligence services depending on this executive that infected the phones of the separatists supposedly spied on.
There is also no mention in the 60 minutes that Surveilled lasts of the infection with Pegasus of the mobile phone of the Russian businessman Alexander Dmitrenko. Dmitrenko accompanied Josep Lluís Alay, head of the Office of the former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont on some of the trips that he made to Moscow to obtain the support of Vladimir Putin‘s administration for the independence process in Catalonia. Logically, these relations with Russian leaders would justify the intervention of the people’s phones who did trhese negotiations, whether with Pegasus or with other technological systems.
Elías Campo’s presence in the documentary becomes grotesque when he pretends to detect telephone infections in a few minutes. Farrow and Campo met with the MEP Jordi Solé and the senator Laura Castel, both from the party ERC that want the independence of Catalonia, in a room of the Parliament of Catalonia. The Catalan coordinator of CatalanGate assured in a few minutes that he had detected two intrusions in Solé’s mobile phone. Citizen Lab, the Canadian team that published the report on the alleged spying on the independentists, took years to prepare that report but, on the other hand, Campo detected infections in the blink of an eye.
The situation reaches comical levels when, towards the end of the documentary, Campo and his family appear having lunch and he explains that his father and mother’s phone were also infected. The activist who is the guiding thread of the Catalan part of the documentary, goes further, however, and improvises the examination of his sister’s phone. He moves his fingers over her mobile and assures that it is also infected. In the CatalanGate published by Citizen Lab, the sister does not appear as one of the people spied on.
Junts, another political party who want the independence of Catalonia, has asked the Catalan Parliament to approve a proposal applauding Surveilled. The independence movement has long approved and applauded Farrow and his CatalanGate. The professional and political rigor of this documentary, on the other hand, deserves a very bad grade.