Integrity Score 525
No Records Found
No Records Found
By Prema Sridevi
Part two of the column continues....
The Pegasus Project and the massive data leak is soon spiralling into a global scandal. The story has huge implications and ramifications for the world’s journalism fraternity yet pro-government media mouthpieces in India have gone on to brazenly parrot the government’s views and call the report exaggerated and based on conjectures.
Let’s dispassionately take a look at both sides. The media organisations that are supporting the Indian government are basing their arguments mostly on the following statement from the original expose. For instance, The Guardian, which is also part of the media entities that worked on The Pegasus Project states: “The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets of NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.”
The consortium of journalists that worked on The Pegasus Project has accused the governments of spying because the NSO Group has made it amply clear that it sells its Pegasus software only to vetted sovereign governments. In such a scenario, if their spyware is being so widely misused, there are only 2 possibilities:
NSO Group secretly sold the malware to private entities in violation of their own code.
Governments actually bought the software to spy on their “people of interest”.
Let’s assume that the government did no wrongdoing and the first case scenario was true. What is then worrying is the response of the government to such a global expose. Why would any government that is not responsible for unsanctioned spying be caught on the backfoot and in a self defense mode when they must actually be outraged at the company and by this time be in active talks with the Israeli government to rein in their notorious company (NSO Group) that perhaps was outlandishly dishing out malicious spyware to private entities which is possibly endangering the privacy of many Indians.
Read full column here: https://theprobe.in/pegasus-why-the-unsanctioned-use-misuse-and-abuse-of-this-spyware-must-stop/