A thorough probe into the reported act of snooping is surely needed to clear the air
Snoopgate is back. Facebook claimed in 2019 that a spyware, Pegasus, developed by Israeli cyberweapons company NSO Group, was used to target Indians, lawyers and rights activists among them. This Sunday, Pegasus surfaced again, reportedly targeting another group of Indians, including journalists, rights activists, politicians and presumably a sitting judge. The Government has emphatically denied any role in the affair. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said that the report was not only “bereft of facts but also founded on pre-conceived conclusions”. Amid disruption of Parliament by the Opposition, Home Minister Amit Shah said the snoopgate report was by “disrupters for the obstructers”. The latest revelation came on the eve of the monsoon session of Parliament which was even otherwise expected to be stormy for various reasons. The Opposition has held the Government responsible for the snoop report and demanded a probe. A probe is surely needed to clear the air; otherwise allegations of such a nature will pose a threat to Indian democracy. Only a thorough probe can set at rest a lot of wild speculation the snoop report raises. The NSO Group claims two things. One, that it provides Pegasus to authorised Government agencies. Two, the Israeli Ministry of Defence’s approval is necessary for offering the spyware. The latter is the case because Israel apparently considers Pegasus a weapon. That also opened the possibility that a foreign agency is behind the surveillance.
The probe in India should coincide with a global probe into the affair as well because there are other, tangential scenarios as well. For one, the process of a Government agency acquiring the spyware will reveal which agency wanted it and for what reason. For another, it can throw light on the presence of a middleman, if any. After all, there are claims and counterclaims on how a kind of surveillance software found its way into a South American country. Finally, the international community can set up a transparent process of countries acquiring such spyware in future. The world is already witnessing the growth of the surveillance and interception industry. In Israel itself, there are several companies involved in this business. Back home, the Pegasus affair will not be forgotten in a hurry. It is an unusual coincidence that the phone numbers of activists the NIA arrested in the Elgar Parishad case, their family members and lawyers were found among the leaked numbers’ database. The surveillance of the journalists was done between 2018 and the general elections in 2019. Snooping is not new in the country. Phone tapping was a charge levelled against the Governments of the day in Rajasthan and Gujarat, for instance. Way back in 2011, the Union Finance Minister’s office was claimed to have been bugged, shaking the then Government at the Centre. In India, legal mechanisms to place people under surveillance and intercept information in an authorised manner already exist and that makes the Pegasus affair that much more alarming and intriguing.
