Spyware in Spain targeted the prime minister and his enemies

RESIDENTS OF SPAIN’S capital were expecting a quiet day off on May 2nd, a holiday commemorating Madrid’s uprising against Napoleon in 1808. They got a newsy one. For weeks the headlines had been consumed with a scandal known as CatalanGate. In April the magazine and the Citizen Lab, an NGO at the University of Toronto, revealed that the phones of at least 67 people, nearly all associated with the Catalan separatist movement, had been infected with spyware, mainly a programme called Pegasus. They included Catalonia’s four most recent regional presidents. (Two others were Basque separatists.)