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Informist, Tuesday, Apr. 29, 2025

 

NEW DELHI – The Supreme Court on Tuesday said there was nothing wrong in a country using spyware for security reasons, but the question was whom it was being used against. The top court was hearing a batch of petitions seeking a probe into allegations of targeted surveillance of journalists, activists and politicians using Israeli spyware Pegasus.

 

What was wrong if the country and the government were using spyware, asked Justice Surya Kant. "We can't sacrifice the security of the nation...To have spyware is not wrong, against whom you are using is the question," the court said. The bench, also comprising Justice N.K. Singh, said the top court would look into the issues if the spyware was used against a civil society person. "Civil individuals who have the right to privacy will be protected under the Constitution," the court said.

 

The court said that the report by a technical committee on the Pegasus case couldn't be made public as a document for discussion on streets. Any report that touched the security and sovereignty of the country would not be touched and disclosed, the court said. But individuals who wanted to know whether they were included in the spyware could be informed, the court added. The court's remarks came after petitioners requested for a redacted report of the committee.

 

In the hearing, petitioners informed the apex court that WhatsApp had accepted before a US district court that hacking had been carried out through Pegasus. In December, the US court had found an Israeli company, NSO Group Technologies, liable for unauthorised surveillance of 1,400 WhatsApp accounts using its spyware Pegasus in 2019. The top court asked the petitioners to place the copy of the US court judgment and placed the matter for hearing on Jul. 30. 

 

In 2021, the apex court formed a technical committee of domain experts to look into allegations of snooping of prominent citizens, including journalists, politicians, and civil right activists. Reading parts of the report, the top court had in 2021 said five mobile devices out of the 29 it had examined showed signs of malware attacks, but it couldn't be "said to be Pegasus".

 

Media organisations from around the world, including The Washington Post and The Guardian, and Indian news website The Wire, as part of their 'Pegasus Project' expose in 2021, revealed that over 300 Indian mobile phone numbers belonging to politicians, journalists, and activists had either been under surveillance or selected for possible surveillance. 

 

Petitioners who sought a probe into these allegations include politicians such as John Brittas and social activist Jagdeep Chhokar, apart from journalists such as N. Ram, Sashi Kumar, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, and Rupesh Kumar Singh, a Jharkhand-based journalist who claimed he and his wife Ipsa Shatakshi were victims of hacking themselves.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Avishek Dutta

 

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