Beatriz Parera
06/29/2019 13:52 – Updated: 06/30/2019 09:29
The National Intelligence Center (CNI) has detected in recent days actions of ‘hacking’ the professional and personal accounts of the main protagonists of the case against Oriol Junqueras and 11 other pro-independence politicians. The secret services have already given notice and implemented security measures after locating actions directed against the seven magistrates of the court. The four members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is accusing of rebellion, have been another of the objectives of a large-scale pirate attack carried out by professionals. The collective Anonymous Catalonia has assumed the attack.
The performance of ‘hackers’ has been developed massively and on a large scale. In addition to trying to access the ’emails’ of Manuel Marchena and the rest of the court, they have focused their attention on the messages exchanged by Javier Zaragoza, Consuelo Madrigal, Jaime Moreno and Javier Cadena.
Anonymous has managed to access the professional email of judge Marchena and has criticized the lack of care of the magistrate when choosing the password for his email: “It is curious, that judges of the Supreme Court, such as Marchena, have codes of 7 letters with the name of someone dear”.
But this organization has not achieved all its objectives. In one of its messages it comes to attach a screenshot of the main page of the magistrate’s mail and it expresses sorry for not being able to give information on the status of the sentence.
The priority of the CNI, once the measures to avoid data leaks are reinforced, is to locate the culprits. The investigations focus on separatist groups and their activity in social networks.
Precisely Twitter is one of the open tracking routes. Three days ago Anonymous Catalonia’s account posted a message boasting privacy holes in the judges’ emails. “Those of @ PoderJudicialEs have a security problem”, they indicated, accompanying these words with an ironic emoticon. Immediately after publication, the tweet collected almost 300 adhessions and raised comments such as “Filter the sentence already written!” or “the back door has been left open ….”
This same Saturday, and from the same account, Anonymous rejoiced to have achieved its goal and called “clowns” to the security services. “Luck that we warned you with a tweet more than two days ago, damn buffoons”, it indicated to assure thereafter: “By the way, it was not only ” attempts”….”.
As specified by the sources consulted, the objective of the ‘hacking’ has been the corporate emails of the judges, with the domain of the judicial power. Attempts to access the private accounts of several of the magistrates have also been detected, an issue that is of more concern for security purposes. Undoubtedly, in order to locate these accounts, an intense previous work is necessary to trace those private mails. There is no doubt about the objective of the hackers: to know the content of their personal conversations, among themselves or with third parties and thus obtain sensitive information.
Under deliberation
In the last 15 days, the activity of the court, now removed from the media focus in which it has remained during the hearing, has not stopped. In just two weeks they have decided on such important issues as the request to release Junqueras to complete the act that would have allowed him to assume his seat as member of the European Parliament, the release of the vast majority of the accused or the initiative to send a question for a prejudicial ruling to the European Court of Justice to demand clarifications on the limits of the immunity of MEPs.
The court has also communicated, at the request of the Ministry of the Interior, that there are no pending proceedings that require the presence of the prisoners of the ‘procés’ in prisons in Madrid. After its response, Penitentiary Institutions activated the return of the preventive inmates to Catalan prisons, where they have been since Thursday and awaiting sentencing. At that time, which is not expected until next September, they will return to Madrid for notification of the decision.
In addition to these issues related to the progress of the procedure, the deliberations are already underway. Until a few days ago, the court had not entered in the very core of the facts. During the hearing, the priority was the examination of the evidence, from the freedom of each one of its members to assess the statements of the more than 400 witnesses, the expert witnesses heard in the room and the documentary admitted from the parties. It will be now when the intimate conviction that each magistrate has been forming during this time is exposed before the rest. Cards on the table: it is time to compare conclusions and harmonize those of all in a common criterion and decide between rebellion and sedition.
Other actions
It is not the first time that Anonymous vents its rage on the judges. A little over a year ago they claimed the blockade of the Constitutional Court website, which suffered a massive attack of denial of services for hours. More recently, the group also led a campaign on Twitter to reveal the identity of people who use anonymous profiles against pro-independence people in Catalonia. Many of them were judges.
The alert of the secret services has jumped with the trial already ready for sentencing and when the deliberations are already being developed after a hearing that has lasted four months and in which the defendants face requests for a sentence of up to 25 years for rebellion. This is, therefore, the most sensitive moment of the procedure, the lapse in which the final decision is played, the sentence that will determine the immediate future of those affected.
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