BUDAPEST – Hungary used the invasive Pegasus spy software, a senior ruling party official said Thursday, but insisted the government had not spied on citizens illegally.
In July Hungary was the only EU country listed by an investigative journalism consortium as a potential user of the spyware, with hundreds of targets including journalists, lawyers and other public figures.
Smartphones infected with Pegasus are essentially turned into pocket spying devices, allowing the user to read the target’s messages, look through their photos, track their location and even turn on their camera without them knowing.
But nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has so far refused to confirm that it used Pegasus.
Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto insisted that the government has “no knowledge” of illegal data collection.
But ruling party Fidesz MP Lajos Kosa said “yes” Thursday when asked by a Hungarian journalist if the Interior Ministry had bought the software.
“I don’t see anything objectionable in it,” said Kosa, who chairs a parliamentary defence and law enforcement committee, after a hearing of the committee.
“In many cases the large tech companies carry out much broader monitoring of citizens than the Hungarian state does,” he said.
Kosa said that when purchasing the software, the Interior Ministry undertook not to violate anyone’s rights when using it.
He also said that Interior Minister Sandor Pinter told the committee that the security services always acted lawfully, either with the permission of a judge or the justice minister.
An opposition member of the committee Agnes Vadai told reporters that Pinter refused to confirm or deny that journalists or politicians have been surveilled using the software.
She also said that the minutes of Thursday’s committee meeting have been classified until 2050.
US authorities on Wednesday put the software’s maker NSO on a blacklist of restricted companies.
“These tools have… enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent,” the US Commerce Department said in a statement.
NSO fired back at the decision, saying its “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime.”