Did UPA-II buy Israeli interception tools?

‘I do not remember about any of this,’ Kapil Sibal told

The Sunday Guardian.

In the summer of June 2013, an official delegation of the Department of Telecom (DOT), Government of India, led by then minister Kapil Sibal went to Israel for a five-day tour from 15-19 June. The delegation members, including Sibal, during this tour, met representatives of multiple Israeli companies.

One such company, whose representatives met Sibal, was Verint Systems. Verint Systems is an established global player in providing mobile interception and surveillance systems. The top leadership of Verint convinced Sibal and his team that they had the required tools to intercept calls and other communication services like Gmail, Blackberry, Yahoo, Skype and other similar communication platforms. Later, people at Verint had a discussion with other relevant verticals of the DOT, including CERT-IN (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team).

A few years later, in 2015, it was revealed that the same software was used by the intelligence agencies of the Peruvian government, which bought it for $22 million to spy on the then vice president of the country, apart from other political leaders and influential private individuals. The system that the Peruvian intelligence agencies were using could track up to 5,000 people and record up to 300 conversations simultaneously.

A similar system was sold to the Azerbaijan and Indonesian governments to identify LGBTQ individuals and activists. Bahrain, South Sudan and Columbia, apart from the Peruvian government, used it for political