Italian lawmakers say Italy used spyware to target phones of immigration activists, but not against journalist

Summary

An Italian parliamentary committee confirmed that the Italian government used spyware made by the Israeli company Paragon to hack several activists working to save immigrants at sea. The committee, however, said its investigation concluded that a prominent Italian journalist was not among the victims, leaving key questions about the spyware attacks unanswered. The Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic, known as COPASIR, published a report on Thursday that concluded a months-long inquiry into the use of Paragon’s spyware, known as Graphite, across Italy. Israeli newspaper Haaretz first wrote about the report. In January, WhatsApp began sending notifications to around 90 of its users, alerting them that they may have been targeted with Paragon’s spyware. Several people in Italy came forward after receiving the notifications, prompting a scandal in Italy, which has a long history of hosting spyware companies, as well as its government’s own spyware uses and abuses. Since then, COPASIR has investigated the allegations with the goal of clarifying exactly what happened. COPASIR specifically investigated the targeting of Luca Casarini and Giuseppe Caccia, who both work for Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian nonprofit with the mission of rescuing immigrants who try to cross the Mediterranean Sea. In both their cases, the committee concluded that they were lawfully targeted by Italian intelligence agencies as part of investigations related to the alleged facilitation of illegal immigration into the country. But the COPASIR committee concluded there was no evidence that Francesco Cancellato, a journalist who also received a notification from WhatsApp warning him he had been a target of Paragon’s spyware, had been targeted by Italy’s intelligence agencies. The committee wrote that its representatives were able to query the intelligence agencies’ spyware database and audit logs for Cancellato’s phone number, and did not find any relevant records. The comm...