Pegasus Snooping Allegations To Be Probed By A Panel Of Experts
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-09-24 07:25:24
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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
After the Centre did not file a proper affidavit (it filed a short one), the Supreme Court has decided to appoint a panel of experts to probe the allegations of snooping upon a wide cross-section of Indian citizens using the Pegasus spyware. This is welcome.
The Centre had cited national security concerns while refusing to file a detailed affidavit. It has said that terrorists will be alerted if it was to make pubic how and which software it uses to track their conversations and movements.
But the question in the Pegasus case is entirely different. When the Pegasus Project, an international collaborative project of journalists to probe illegal snooping using the spyware (reported in India by The Wire) disclosed that a huge number of top Indian politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and civil activists were on the list, the question asked of the government was whether it had purchased the spyware and if so, was it being used following due process. No names were needed to be disclosed. Just the legality of the whole process needed to be established. But the government did not even do that leading to opposition protests and an almost complete washout of the monsoon session of parliament.
But with the Supreme Court breathing down its neck, the government offered to set up a committee to go into the allegations. It is good that the Supreme Court has itself set up a panel for the task as it will have more credibility. Since questions of right to privacy, personal freedom, unauthorized surveillance and matters of legality and due process are involved, the nation has the right to know who hacked into the phones (as preliminary investigations reveal that they were indeed hacked) of the persons on the list in the Pegasus Project report and whether due process was followed in doing so. If the government did not do so, as it claims, for national security concerns it should also be deeply interested in probing who did it.
