Our View: Jury still out over Pega inquiry

AFTER weeks of build-up in the media, the visit by members of the European parliament’s Pega committee, which is gathering information regarding the use of the Pegasus and similar spyware surveillance software, in EU member-states and third countries, very little emerged from their meetings. The committee met ministers, the attorney-general, local deputies and journalists while in Cyprus for a little over 24 hours and would not have had time to study the information they had received.

This was the message of the Pega chair, Jeroen Lenaers, who declined to go into any details of what was discussed at meetings, although he said there was “a very intensive exchange of views with the attorney-general” who had given “an extensive explanation as to his role in the legal system of Cyprus and what he could share about the investigation in the van case.” He was not prepared to say whether the responses were what the committee wanted, explaining that these needed to be discussed with his colleagues after the visit.

“And we will take all the information we’ve received and we will check it with other sources of information that we also have at our availability and then we will come to our final conclusions which you will find in the report of the European parliament,” said Lenaers. They asked many questions which were answered, “one by one” but these answers had to be corroborated in other ways, he added, implying that nothing they heard would be taken at face value.

Nothing more could have been asked of the Cyprus authorities, which cooperated fully with Pega, a fact acknowledged by the MEPs. There were countries that had refused to accept visits by Pega, said the deputy minister of innovation, Kyriakos Kokkinos. Cyprus was the only country that responded to the questionnaire sent by Pega two months ago, MEPs said.

None of this means the government will escape criticism or censure in the European parliament’s report when it is published, but at least it cooperated and did not try to hide the fact that there were companies developing spyware surveillance software, based in Cyprus – not just the one involved in the spy van affair.

Kokkinos said it was explained to MEPs that there was a legal framework for the operation of these companies and a supervisory mechanism. These two frameworks were currently under review and a bill that would tighten them was being prepared and expected to be passed in spring, said Kokkinos.

Tightening the framework through the addition of regulations would be a step in the right direction, but the problem for most people is that there is never any way of knowing whether the authorities are ensuring compliance of spyware companies with the regulations.