‘India among nations that hacked phones’

THE PROBE SAID THAT 38 INDIAN JOURNALISTS, INCLUDING THOSE FROM HT, MINT, WERE TARGETED

NEW DELHI: India is among the countries that used Israeli company NSO Group’s Pegasus phone hacking software to potentially target politicians, journalists and activists, an international collaborative investigation involving 17 media organisations including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Die Zeit said. India’s news website The Wire was one of the 17.

The first part of the multi-part investigation, released late on Sunday night, said that 38 Indian journalists (according to The Guardian), including those from mainstream publications (three current Hindustan Times journalists are named, as is one from sister publication Mint), and websites, apart from freelancers were targeted. The 38 are among 180 journalists the report said were targeted worldwide, including the editor of the Financial Times Roula Khalaf, and journalists from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times, and Le Monte.

In its response published by The Guardian, the Indian government termed the investigation a “fishing expedition” , that there is “no concrete basis out truth associated with the claim that there was government surveillance on specific people”, and referred to a 2019 controversy surrounding Pegasus when a vulnerability in WhatsApp was used to deliver the malware to at least 20 Indian citizens, including journalists, lawyers and activists.

“Government of India’s response to a right to information application about the use of Pegasus has been prominently reported by media and is in itself sufficient to counter any malicious claims about the alleged association between the government of India and Pegasus,” India said in its response.

“It is important to note that government agencies have a well-established protocol for interception, which includes sanction and supervision from highly ranked officials in central and state governments, for clear stated reasons only in national interest,” it added.

The investigation was based on a data leak of around 50,000 numbers obtained by Amnesty International and Paris-based Forbidden Stories, a non-profit. To be sure, as the methodology of the investigation explains, the presence of a number does not indicate the individual’s phone was hacked — just that it was of interest. Amnesty International subsequently forensically investigated 67 of these phones, and found 23 hacked and 14 showing signs of attempted penetration. The Wire reported that 10 of the phones forensically examined in India showed they had either been hacked or signs of an attempted hacking. NSO Group, in a response to Forbidden Stories and its media partners, said the interpretations from the leaked dataset were misleading.