In this episode, Suhasini Haidar discusses the diplomatic implications of the Pegasus revelations

In the space of a week, 17 media organisations across the world have unloaded the names of thousands of people – mainly journalists, activists, government officials who were on a list of numbers believed to have been targeted for hacking, using an Israeli company NSO’s technology called Pegasus. The list was leaked to a French organisation called Forbidden Stories which worked with Amnesty International’s tech arm.

The revelations are explosive for a number of reasons:

1.      Pegasus technology is so powerful as a cybersurveillance tool, it is actually classified as a weapon, and goes through export clearances as a lethal weapon would from Israel- once it infects a phone, it can not only read every message and call, it can turn on the phone remotely to record every conversation made near the device, without the target’s knowledge.

2.     NSO, which has denied the list, says it only sells and installs the technology for foreign governments or their law enforcement agencies, which would imply that if the list is real, these were people under surveillance from governments

3.     Ten countries were seen as the most concentrated areas of the targets, implying that people in those countries were being hacked by a government, and the suspicion is, it was their own governments who had the most reason to do so. Apart from India, the list of countries includes Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

4.     NSO and the Israeli government have repeatedly said that Pegasus is meant to track down only the most wanted terrorists and criminals, and the invasion of privacy that it involves is only warranted because of that. Yet, a majority if not nearly all the numbers tracked belong to civil society, government officials, and political opposition leaders, not dreaded criminals. In India for example, of 115 names released thus far, 40 are journalists, 40 are civil rights activists 14 are politicians including ministers, and the minister of IT . Globally there are ten heads of state or former heads of state on the various lists, atleast 180 journalists amongst 50,000 phone numbers believed to be targets chosen by clients of NSO since 2016.

This is not the first time such revelations have come about with such far reaching consequences.

To read more, visit the article on The Hindu website here 

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