The Supreme Court committee had on January 3 issued a notice urging people to approach the committee if they felt that their phone was also a victim of the Pegasus attack.
(Illustration: The Wire)
Mumbai: Several human rights activists and academics and their lawyers implicated in the Elgar Parishad case have written to the Supreme Court-appointed technical committee probing the Pegasus espionage case that their phones were also attacked by Pegasus software.
Let us inform that on January 3, the committee had issued a notice appealing to the people that if they feel that their phone was also a victim of Pegasus attack, then they can contact the committee.
According to the report, advocate Nihal Singh Rathod, representing several accused in the Elgar Parishad case, has sent a written letter to the committee in this regard. Along with him, another lawyer Jagdish Meshram and a member of cultural group Kabir Kala Manch, Rupali Jadhav have also written to the committee in this regard. The trio were among the first to be notified by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab in 2019 about possible spying on their phones.
Professor Heni Babu of Delhi University and lawyer and social activist Sudha Bharadwaj have also sent their views before the committee.
Bhardwaj was recently released on bail in the Elgar Parishad case, while Heni Babu is currently in jail. Therefore, before the committee, Heni Babu has sent his side through wife Jenny Rowena.
Rathod has mentioned in his application that he started receiving video calls on WhatsApp from unknown international numbers in early 2019, to which he would get disconnected when he tried to answer. Being fed up with this happening again and again, he blocked those numbers.
Rathod has written that despite this, he officially complained to WhatsApp after getting repeated calls from other international numbers.
Surendra Gadling’s wife Minal Gadling, Meshram, who was arrested in the Elgar Parishad case, and Veera Saathidar, a social activist, writer and actor who passed away in April last year, have also spoken of receiving similar suspicious calls.
Rathod wrote in his letter that his suspicions turned into conviction when senior Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Rylton called him and informed him about the spying software. Jadhav, Meshram, Gadling and Saathidar were also contacted by Citizen Lab.
Rathod says he has since been advocating several sensitive cases, including the case of GN Saibaba, serving a life sentence in Nagpur Central Jail for having links with Maoists.
They have written that their phones were being spied on to secretly obtain important information related to their clients.
It is known that an international media consortium, in which the wire As part of the Pegasus project, it was revealed that the phones of politicians, journalists, activists, Supreme Court officials were allegedly hacked or monitored through Pegasus spyware from Israel’s NSO Group Company. But were.
In this episode from 18th July the wire Including 17 media organizations around the world began publishing a database of more than 50,000 leaked mobile numbers that were being monitored or potentially under surveillance through Pegasus spyware.
According to this investigation, a leaked list of thousands of telephone numbers of people of interest to clients of multiple governments, of Israeli surveillance technology company NSO Group, contains 300 verified Indian numbers, who have been asked by ministers, opposition leaders, journalists, judiciary, etc. It has been used by associated people, businessmen, government officials, rights activists etc.
After this disclosure came to light, a big political controversy arose about it in the country and around the world. Explain that NSO Group sells this military grade spyware only to governments. The Indian government has neither denied nor confirmed the purchase of Pegasus.
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