Why is Spain ignoring Ronan Farrow’s documentary ‘Surveilled’? Answer: Catalonia.

In November, the documentary Surveilled produced by journalist Ronan Farrow (son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, winner of a Pulitzer for uncovering the Harvey Weinstein case and one of the hundred most influential personalities of 2018 according to Time) premiered on HBO Max. The documentary is having a lot of repercussions around the world, but curiously in Spain it is being totally ignored by most of the media, although the Spanish state is a prominent protagonist in it.

Surveilled: exposing spyware used in Catalonia

In the documentary Surveilled, Ronan Farrow delves into the dark world of the spyware industry, such as Pegasus, using the Catalangate case as a common thread.

The Catalangate scandal was already uncovered by him in 2022 in the New Yorker report “How democracies spy on their citizens”.

It documented the discovery by the Canadian Citizen Lab of the most important case of cell phone spying so far: At least 65 people (politicians, activists and lawyers of the movement for the independence of Catalonia) had been illegally spied on, allegedly by the Spanish state in its fight against the peaceful independence movement, whose only “crime” is to raise a political proposal unacceptable to the ultra-nationalism that forms the basis of the Spanish identity.

This type of spyware, such as Pegasus, managed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is sold only to states to supposedly prevent terrorists, organized mafias and dangerous criminals from committing assassinations. There is an unspoken consensus that, in such cases, it is appropriate to violate the right to privacy and intimacy to prevent greater evils

But the thesis of the documentary is that this technology can be used beyond these exceptional cases.

Spain is implicated

Dictatorial regimes, which already violate all kinds of rights, can use it outside the aforementioned cases, as the Saudi regime did with Pegasus to track and assassinate journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And the documentary argues that Western democracies can also be tempted to use these almost invisible technologies for spurious purposes against political rivals.

Thus the example of the Spanish state serves to illustrate how it is crossing all red lines to try to destroy a political movement that questions its membership in the state, even if the independence movement acts democratically through civil demonstrations and negotiations and poses a political outcome through a referendum.