Damning silence: On India’s Pegasus probe
U.S. ruling gives fresh cause to reopen India’s stalled Pegasus probe
A U.S. court’s decision holding an Israeli company liable for surreptitiously installing Pegasus, a spyware suite, on the phones of targeted individuals through WhatsApp, has brought the focus back on the Centre’s questionable inaction when such surveillance allegations surfaced in India in 2021. The U.S. District Court for Northern District of California ruled that NSO Group Technologies violated both federal and State laws against computer fraud and abuse. WhatsApp sued the NSO Group in October 2019, alleging that its system was used by the Israeli company to plant malware on approximately 1,400 mobile phones and devices for surveilling their users. In a summary judgment, the court agreed with WhatsApp that its application had been reverse-engineered or ‘decompiled’ to create a modified version called ‘WhatsApp Installation Server’ or WIS. In the backdrop of this ruling, the question that arises in India is about the fate of reports submitted by a court-appointed expert committee in 2022 to the Supreme Court of India. The then Chief Justice of India (CJI), N.V. Ramana, had read out a few paragraphs from the report of the panel’s overseeing judge, Justice (retired) R.V. Raveendran. The report said the Technical Committee found no conclusive evidence on the presence of Pegasus, but there was some kind of malware in five out of the 29 phones examined. The reports are yet to be made public.Even if there was no effective hearing or follow-up action, what cannot be forgotten is that CJI Ramana had observed in open court that the government did not cooperate with the committee’s investigation. It was conduct typical of the Modi regime, which has repeatedly demonstrated that silence, denial and obfuscation form its stock responses whenever allegations emerge. It showed no interest in probing disclosures that the phones of journalists, activists, doctors and court staff were targets of spyware. It made a strange claim that the country had such ironclad laws that illegal surveillance was not possible. It adopted the untenable position that acknowledging that its agencies possessed any particular software would jeopardise national security. All this, despite admitting in Parliament that it was aware of some users being targeted by Pegasus through WhatsApp. It did not respond to credible reports that Pegasus may have been used to plant evidence on computers to frame dissidents. In the light of a judicial decision, albeit an overseas one, that the NSO Group is liable for the use of its spyware by its clients, solely government entities, the time has come for sealed reports to be opened and deeper probes begun. The government should come clean on whether it possesses surveillance software. Otherwise, citizens will be rendered even more vulnerable to illegal surveillance.