New Delhi, July 20, 2021 (PPI-OT):After appearing on a leaked list of “potential” or actual targets for spying by Israeli company NSO’s Pegasus spyware, former Congress President Rahul Gandhi has termed the targeted surveillance “illegal and deplorable”.
“If your information is correct, the scale and nature of surveillance you describe goes beyond an attack on the privacy of individuals. It is an attack on the democratic foundations of our country. It must be thoroughly investigated and those responsible be identified and punished,” Rahul said in a statement.
According to media reports former Congress President Rahul Gandhi, former election commissioner Askhok Lavasa, election strategist Prashant Kishor, Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee and Union Ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and Prahlad Patel appeared on a leaked list of “potential” or actual targets for spying by Israeli company NSO’s Pegasus spyware.
Two mobile phones used by Rahul Gandhi appeared on the list – one was added in 2018 when he was the president of the Congress party and the other after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, according to the reports. Numbers belonging to at least five of Rahul Gandhi’s close friends and other Congress party officials, including Sachin Rao and Alankar Sawai, also figured on the list, which also has the names of dozens of journalists, activists and healthcare experts.
The phones targeted were infiltrated by a malicious software called Pegasus, which is sold by the NSO Group. The spyware can secretly unlock the target’s phone, computer or other devices, collect information and transfer it to another device without the permission of the user. The Israeli company has said it sells Pegasus only to government agencies to fight terrorism and other serious crimes and that it does not operate the spyware licensed to its clients.
Those who were targeted in India included The Wire’s editors Siddharth Varadarajan and M.K. Venu, journalist Sushant Singh and Prashant Kishor, a forensic analysis found. The phone of Prashant Kishor, who had worked with the TMC in West Bengal and DMK in Tamil Nadu that went to polls in April, was found to have been compromised as recently as July 14.
Investigations confirmed the Pegasus attack, or signs of potential targeting, on phones linked to 10 Indian numbers and 27 phones around the world, according to The Guardian.
The family members of a Supreme Court employee who had accused the then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment in 2019 are on the list. Askhok Lavasa, who is on the list, served as an Election Commissioner between January 2018 and August 2020, and had expressed dissenting views on the three-member election panel’s ruling that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had not violated the Model Code of Conduct in 2019.
Others on the list include Gagandeep Kang, a well-known virologist, M. Hari Menon, the India country head for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and two employees of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based in Delhi.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based non-profit organisation, and Amnesty International got access to the list of thousands of potential targets worldwide and shared it with 17 media publications, including The Wire, The Guardian and The Washington Post. Amnesty International’s Security Lab provided forensic analyses and technical support, while Forbidden and the media houses conducted the investigation, called the Pegasus Project.
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