Lori Roussey

Lori Roussey is a data protection law and policy specialist. She focuses on public private partnerships litigation as well as new technologies regulation. Lori has experience as the Data Protection Officer of a major humanitarian organisation and is now the Founder and Director of Data Rights, a litigation and advocacy non-profit focused on surveillance, sustainability, and interoperability.

Events with this speaker

Day 2

12:15

60m

Suing spyware in Europe: news from the front!

In 2022, CitizenLab contacted a member of the Spanish non-profit Irídia to tell them that one of their members had likely been hacked with Pegasus spyware. The target, a lawyer, had been spied on by the Spanish government in 2020 because he represented a Catalan politician who was in prison. His phone was infected with Pegasus during the COVID-19 lockdown, on the same day he was having an online meeting with other lawyers working on the case. Irídia and the lawyer (Andreu) decided to take the case to court. A few years later, he met with Data Rights and invited them to join forces and bring in partners from across Europe to increase the impact. This collaboration led to the creation of the PEGA coalition in May 2025. This talk goes over the status of the case and work we have done across Europe to bring spyware use in court.