More troubling details emerged on Monday regarding the use of Israeli Pegasus spyware software and the high-profile personalities in India ...
More troubling details emerged on Monday regarding the use of Israeli Pegasus spyware software and the high-profile personalities in India it may potentially have been used to snoop on.
Names of potential victims include Rahul Gandhi, whose phone might have been compromised in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. At the time, Gandhi was the president of the main opposition party, the Congress.
A Supreme Court staffer and her family were selected as potential targets days after she accused the Ranjan Gogoi, the Supreme Court Chief Justice at the time, of sexual harassment.
Also on the list was Ashok Lavasa, an election commissioner who had ruled that Prime Minister Modi had violated the Election Commission’s model code of conduct during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Lavasa’s name was added to the list of potential targets just weeks after his action against Modi.
Surveillance weapon
All the names are from a leaked database of phone numbers that reportedly reflects potential targets of illegal cyber surveillance using “Pegasus”, an Israel-made spying software so uniquely powerful that some experts have called it a “weapon”. Once installed, Pegasus can harvest all data from a victim’s phone – from keystrokes to photos to turning on the microphone and video camera without the user’s...
